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CfiEXRIGHT DEPOSm 



The Return to Faith 

and Other Addresses 



By 

WILLIAM NORTH RICE 

Piofesaot of Geology, Wesleyan University 




THE ABINGDON PRESS 

PJEW YORK CINCINNATI 



^^1^ 



Copyright, 1916, by 
WILLIAM NORTH RICE 



i 



.tc 



NOV 28 1916 

©CLA445806 



TO HER 

WHOSE SYMPATHY, COUNSEL, AND 
CRITICISM AIDED IN THESE AD- 
DRESSES, AS IN ALL MY WORK 
FOR MORE THAN TWOSCORE YEARS, 
AND THE MEMORY OF WHOSE UN- 
SELFISH LIFE IS TO ME AN ABIDING 

INSPIRATION. ::::::: 



CONTENTS 

FAGS 

Preface 7 

I. The Return to Faith 11 

II. The Alternative — Christianity or Ag- 
nosticism 41 

Address on Matriculation Day, School of 
Theology, Boston University, October 
12, 1887. 

ill. The One Saving Name 68 



IV. The Vision of God 92 

Baccalaureate Sermon, Wesleyan Univer- 
sity, June 27, 1909. 

y. The Influence of Science in The- 
ology 121 

University Sermon, Wesleyan University, 
June 20, 1915. 



PREFACE 

The addresses which form this Httle 
volume were prepared for various occasions, 
separated by considerable intervals of time. 
They have no mutual dependence or natural 
consecutive order. They have, nevertheless, 
a certain unity, in that from various sides 
they touch the great problem, whether, and 
by what adjustments, we may, in this age 
of science and critical investigation, hold fast 
the noble heritage of Christian faith which 
has come down to us from an age whose in- 
tellectual environment was so different from 
our own. That theme has been before me 
continually from the days of early manhood, 
and to it what I venture to regard as the 
best work of my Ufe has been devoted. 

A book wherein are reproduced utterances 
of various times and occasions, whatever 
other faults it may have, is sure to be marked 
by two defects. A certain amount of repe- 
tition in treating at different times the same 

7 



8 PREFACE 

theme or closely related themes is unavoid- 
able. As I have desired in this publication 
to preserve the various addresses in substan- 
tial integrity, I have not attempted to re- 
move all passages involving repetition. 
Equally inevitable in such a book is a lack 
of perfect consistency. A mountain presents 
somewhat different aspects when seen from 
different points of view, through different 
atmospheres, and in different moods. There 
is an analogous variation in our views of 
truth. Only omniscience can be absolutely 
consistent. "For substance of doctrine," the 
five papers here collected represent what 
seems to me the best view of truth which I 
have attained. But I have not attempted to 
tone into perfect unison every expression or 
implication which may be found in them. 

The first of these addresses, which gives 
the title to the book, was first prepared for 
the mid-year assembly of the New York 
East Conference of the Methodist Episcopal 
Church. In the somewhat expanded form 
in which it is now published, it was included 
in a course of lectui'es on the Brooks Foun- 



PREFACE 9 

dation at Hamilton Theological Seminary 
in 1900. The address entitled, "The Alter- 
native — Christianity or Agnosticism," was 
given on Matriculation Day, at the School 
of Theology of Boston University, Oc- 
tober 12, 1887. The sermon on "The Vision 
of God" was the Baccalaureate Sermon at 
Wesleyan University, June 27, 1909; and 
the sermon on "The Influence of Science 
in Theology" was the University Sermon 
at Wesleyan University, June 20, 1915 — 
the fiftieth anniversary of my own gradua- 
tion. To me these two sermons have had 
a special interest as being a sort of summary 
of my teaching on the relations of science 
and religion, in a professorial career which 
has extended over almost a half -century and 
which must now be near its ending — in some 
sense an apologia pro vita mea, I venture 
to hope that they may be of interest to some 
of my former students whose friendly 
thought overlooks the limitations and imper- 
fections of my work and lovingly remem- 
bers whatever in it was good. 

It is proper to say that three of these 



10 PREFACE 

papers have been previously published, and 
to acknowledge with thanks the permission 
granted for their repubhcation. The second, 
third, and foui'th have been pubhshed re- 
spectively in The Christian Advocate, Zion's 
Herald, and the Middletown Pennj^ Press. 
The thii'd is also included in the collection 
of sermons pubhshed by Funk and Wag- 
nails mider the title, ^Modern Sermons hj 
World Scholars. 

I desire also to acknowledge my obhgation 
to my brother, the Rev. Charles Francis 
Rice, D.D., for assistance in reading the 
proofs and for critical suggestions. 

Wn.T.TAM North Rice. 



THE RETURN TO FAITH 

I SHALL take as texts for the present dis- 
cussion three passages from a book published 
near the close of the nineteenth century, 
bearing the title "Thoughts on Religion, by 
the Late George John Romanes, Edited by 
Charles Gore" — a book in regard to whose 
origin I shall have somewhat to say later. 
But first of all it may be well to answer the 
question. Who was Romanes, and why are 
his thoughts on rehgion of special interest 
to us? 

Romanes was a boy about ten years old 
when the publication of Darwin's Origin of 
Species opened the modern phase of discus- 
sion of organic evolution. With the pre- 
cocity which is sometimes, though by no 
means always, exhibited by men of excep- 
tional intellectual power, he very early be- 
came one of the prominent expounders and 

11 



12 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

defenders of the doctrine of evolution. In 
some respects he occupied a unique position. 
He was the psychologist of evolution, mak- 
ing pecuharly his own the study of psy- 
chology from an evolutionary standpoint, as 
Alfred Russel Wallace made his own the 
evolutionary study of geographical distribu- 
tion. Wlien the defenders of evolution came 
to be divided more or less definitely into 
three parties in controversy with each other, 
the neo-Lamarckians assigning to natural 
selection a secondary and altogether subordi- 
nate role, while the Weismannians or ultra- 
Darwinians made natural selection the all in 
all of evolution, entirely repudiating any 
more direct effect of environment, Romanes 
became the leader of what might be called 
the orthodox Darwinian school, maintaining 
the dominant influence of natural selection, 
but attributing somewhat of influence to the 
environment. The argumentative writings 
of Romanes were marked by a pecuhar 
clearness and incisiveness of thought. It 
would be, I think, no disparagement of any 
other of the great expounders and defenders 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 13 

of evolution to speak of Romanes as the 
acutest logician among them all. 

Romanes was brought up under Christian 
influences, and in his early life was a Chris- 
tian. In 1873 he wrote a prize essay on 
"Christian Prayer Considered in Relation to 
the Belief that the Almighty Governs the 
World by General Laws." That essay was 
published in 1874. In the few years after 
the writing of that essay his theological 
opinions underwent a very rapid change, so 
that in 1876 he had reached the conclusion 
that there is no sufficient evidence to justify 
theistic belief. That conclusion was set forth 
in a book bearing the title "A Candid Ex- 
amination of Theism, by Physicus." Though 
written in 1876, the book was not published 
until 1878. It was his intention that only a 
single edition of the book should be pub- 
lished, but as a result of some misunder- 
standing a second edition did actually ap- 
pear. The book was published anonymously, 
in order that its arguments should receive 
in the mind of the reader no reinforcement 
from the reputation which the author had 



14 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

already acquired. He felt bound to offer 
to the attention of thinking men the conclu- 
sions which he had reached, though with no 
desire to make converts. The refutation of 
his arguments would undoubtedly have 
pleased him far more than the acceptance of 
his conclusions. I know of no more pathetic 
passage in literature than the concluding 
paragraph of that work, in which is revealed 
the agony of the author's soul in the loss of 
the faith which once he had cherished : 

"And now, in conclusion, I feel it is desir- 
able to state that any antecedent bias with 
regard to theism which I individually possess 
is unquestionably on the side of traditional 
beliefs. It is, therefore, with the utmost 
sorrow that I find myself compelled to ac- 
cept the conclusions here worked out; and 
nothing would have induced me to publish 
them, save the strength of my conviction 
that it is the duty of every member of society 
to give his fellows the benefit of his labors 
for whatever they may be worth. Just as 
I am confident that truth must in the end 
be the most profitable for the race, so I am 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 15 

persuaded that every individual endeavor 
to attain it, provided only that such endeavor 
is unbiased and sincere, ought without hesi- 
tation to be made the conunon property of 
all men, no matter in what direction the 
results of its promulgation may appear to 
tend. And so far as the ruination of indi- 
vidual happiness is concerned, no one can 
have a more lively perception than myself 
of the possibly disastrous tendency of my 
work. So far as I am individually con- 
cerned, the result of this analysis has been 
to show that it be- 
comes my obvious duty to stifle all belief of 
the kind which I conceive to be the noblest, 
and to discipline my intellect with re- 
gard to this matter into an attitude of the 
purest skepticism. And forasmuch as I am 
far from being able to agree with those who 
affirm that the twilight doctrine of the 'new 
faith' is a desirable substitute for the waning 
splendor of 'the old,' I am not ashamed to 
confess that with this virtual negation of 
God the universe to me has lost its soul of 
loveliness ; and although from henceforth the 



16 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

precept to Vork while it is day' will doubt- 
less but gain an intensified force from the 
terribly intensified meaning of the words 
that 'the night cometh when no man can 
work/ yet when at times I think, as think at 
times I must, of the appalling contrast be- 
tween the hallowed glory of that creed which 
once was mine, and the lonely mystery of 
existence as now I find it, — at such times 
I shall ever feel it impossible to avoid the 
sharpest pang of which my nature is sus- 
ceptible. For whether it be due to my in- 
telhgence not being sufficiently advanced to 
meet the requirements of the age, or whether 
it be due to the memory of those sacred asso- 
ciations which to me at least were the sweet- 
est that hfe has given, I camiot but feel that 
for me, and for others who think as I do, 
there is a dreadful truth m those words of 
Hamilton, — Philosophy haraig become a 
meditation, not merely of death, but of 
amiiliilation, the precept 'Know thyself has 
become transformed into the terrific oracle 
to CEdipus — 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 17 

Mayest thou ne'er know the truth of what thou 
art."^ 

In the course of the next few years Ro- 
manes wrote some lectures and essays bear- 
ing more or less upon the theistic question, 
which revealed a gradual departure from 
the position represented by the Candid Ex- 
amination of Theism. In the progress of 
his thought it is evident that the arguments 
in favor of theism came to be regarded as 
having a higher degree of validity than he 
had attributed to them in 1876, and the argu- 
ments against theism seemed less convincing. 
At the time of his death, in 1894, he had in 
contemplation a book which was intended 
to be in some sense a refutation of his own 
Candid Examination of Theism. It was his 
intention that the new work, like the old one, 
should be published anonymously. It was 
to have borne the title, "A Candid Examina- 
tion of Religion, by Metaphysicus." Of the 
proposed work, however, only mere frag- 
ments had been written. In accordance with 
his desire, those fragmentary notes were 

1 Thoughts on Religion, pp. 28, 29. 



18 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

committed to his friend, Charles Gore, then 
Canon of Westminster, now Bishop of Ox- 
ford. After a careful examination of those 
notes Canon Gore wisely concluded that 
they ought to be published. He decided, 
therefore, to publish every one of the frag- 
ments that was sufficiently complete in it- 
self to be intelligible. This was the origin 
of the book "Thoughts on Religion." In the 
editor's preface is quoted the concluding 
chapter of the Candid Examination of 
Theism, showing the author's state of mind 
at the time of the composition of that work. 
Then follow two essays on "The Influence 
of Science upon Religion," written during 
the interval between the publication of the 
Candid Examination of Theism and the 
author's death, but for some reason not pub- 
lished at the time. These two essays indicate 
clearly the transitional stage through which 
the mind of the author was passing in its 
gradual return to faith. Then follow those 
notes of the proposed "Candid Examination 
of Religion," which furnished the motive for 
the publication of the book which is before 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 19 

us. The attitude of Romanes at the close of 
his hfe is set forth in a note by the editor, 
which forms the conclusion of the book ; 

"George Romanes came to recognize, as 
in these written notes so also in conversation, 
that it was 'reasonable to be a Christian be- 
liever' before the activity or habit of faith 
had been recovered. His life was cut short 
very soon after this point was reached; but 
it will surprise no one to learn that the writer 
of these * Thoughts' returned before his death 
to that full, deliberate communion with the 
Church of Jesus Christ which he had for so 
many years been conscientiously compelled 
to forego. In his case the 'pure in heart' 
was after a long period of darkness allowed, 
in a measure before his death, to 'see God.' 

" 'Fecisti nos ad te, Domine; et inquietum 
est cor nostrum donee requieseat in tef 

There come to the mind those noble lines 
in which Tennyson tells the story of the reli- 
gious life of his beloved Hallam: 

.... One indeed I knew 
In many a subtle question versed. 
Who touched a jarring lyre at first. 
But ever strove to make it true : 



20 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

Perplexed in faith, but pure in deeds, 

At last he beat his music out. 

There lives more faith in honest doubt. 
Believe me, than in half the creeds. 

The stor^' of Romanes is profoundly in- 
teresting in itself. The thoughtful mind 
eamiot fail to be interested in the intellectual 
and spiritual biography of any soul, and 
particularly in the biography of a mind so 
keen and a heart so pure as belonged to 
Romanes. But liis story has for us a yet 
deeper meaning as t^^pical of the intellectual 
and rehgious hfe of the period in which he 
lived, the second half of the nineteenth cen- 
tury. In the splendor of his scientific 
achievement, in his loss of faith, in the moral 
earnestness and intense sincerity wliich he 
never lost, in the agony of spiritual longing, 
and in the Hght at evening time, the story of 
Romanes is the stoiy^ of that great half- 
centuiy- with which his life was nearly coex- 
tensive. In the storm and stress of the philo- 
sophic discussions associated with the great 
scientific discoveries of evolution and conser- 
vation of energy-, many a student abandoned 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES SI 

the faith of his fathers, and in later years 
gradually found his way back — not, indeed, 
to the faith as he had held it in childhood, 
but to a better and more intelligent faith. 
Many a student who never withdrew from 
the church and never definitively abandoned 
the behef in Christianity, felt his faith shak- 
ing in the crisis, and felt his faith reestab- 
lished in the calmer years that followed. 

One more quotation from the Thoughts 
on Religion reveals to us somewhat more 
definitely the rationale of the loss and the 
recovery of faith. And not alone in the fact 
of loss and recovery of faith, but also in the 
reasons therefor, is the case of Romanes 
typical of the age in which he lived. We 
all doubted more or less for the same reasons 
which led Romanes to abandon his faith. 
We all found our doubts relieved by the 
same considerations by which his faith was 
restored. 

"When I wrote the preceding treatise 
[the Candid Examination],^ I did not suffi- 

^ The words in brackets are explanatory notes added by the 
editor. 



22 THE RETXTEN TO FAITH 

ciently appreciate the immense importance 
of human nature, as distinguished from 
physical natm-e, in any inquiry touching 
theism. But since then I have seriously 
studied anthropology (including the science 
of comparative religions), psychology, and 
metaphysics, with the result of clearly seeing 
that human natiu-e is the most important 
part of nature as a whole whereby to investi- 
gate the theor}^ of theism. This I ought to 
have anticipated on merely a priori grounds, 
and no doubt should have perceived, had I 
not been too much immersed in merely 
physical research. 

"Moreover, in those days I took it for 
granted that Christianity was played out, 
and never considered it at all as having any 
rational bearing on the question of theism. 
And, though this was doubtless inexcusable, 
I still think that the rational standing of 
Christianity has materially improved since 
then. For then it seemed that Christianity 
was destined to succumb as a rational system 
before the double assault of Darwin from 
without and the negative school of criticism 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 2S 

from within. Not only the book of organic 
nature, but Hkewise its own sacred docu- 
ments, seemed to be declaring against it. 
But now all this has been very materially 
changed. We have all more or less grown 
to see that Darwinism is like Copernicanism, 
etc., in this respect [that is, a theory which 
comes at first as a shock to the current teach- 
ing of Christianity, but is finally seen to be 
in no antagonism to its necessary princi- 
ples] ; while the outcome of the great textual 
battle [that is, the battle in regard to the 
Christian texts or documents] is impar- 
tially considered a signal victory for Chris- 
tianity. Prior to the new [biblical] science, 
there was really no rational basis in thought- 
ful minds, either for the date of any one of 
the New Testament books, or, consequently, 
for the historical truth of any one of the 
events narrated in them. Gospels, Acts, and 
Epistles were all alike shrouded in this un- 
certainty. Hence the validity of the eigh- 
teenth-century skepticism. But now all 
this kind of skepticism has been rendered 
obsolete, and forever impossible; while the 



M THE RETURN TO FAITH 

certainty of enough of Saint Paul's writ- 
ings for the practical purpose of displaying 
the belief of the apostles has been estab- 
lished, as well as the certainty of the publi- 
cation of the Synoptics within the first 
century. An enormous gain has thus ac- 
crued to the objective evidences of Chris- 
tianity. It is most important that the expert 
investigator should be exact, and, as in any 
other science, the lay public must take on 
authority as trustworthy only what both 
sides are agreed upon. But, as in any other 
science, experts are apt to lose sight of the 
importance of the main results agreed upon 
in their fighting over lesser points still in 
dispute. Now it is enough for us that the 
Epistles to the Romans, Galatians, and 
Corinthians have been agreed upon as 
genuine, and that the same is true of the 
Synoptics so far as concerns the main doc- 
trine of Christ himself."^ 

1. Romanes lost his faith by a too exclu- 
sive attention to the lower phases of nature, 

1 Loc cit., pp. 164-166. 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 25 

to the inanimate world and the lower orders 
of life. He regained his faith by increased 
attention to those experiences which are 
peculiar to man. 

The second half of the nineteenth century 
was preeminently characterized by the prog- 
ress made in the sciences of nature. The 
outward and material life of man was trans- 
formed by the applications of science to the 
useful arts. Steam and electricity revolu- 
tionized the modes of transportation and the 
processes of manufacture. Aniline dyes 
gave to the fabrics employed for clothing 
and for decoration colors in comparison with 
which those of the rainbow are pale neutral 
tints. Anaesthetics and antiseptics in great 
degree freed the art of the surgeon from 
its pain and its peril. ISTew measures of 
sanitation arrested the age-long massacre 
of the innocents, and added to the length 
as well as to the comfort of human life. But 
the material gifts of science are of far less 
value than the intellectual treasures which 
it bestowed upon humanity. The profound 
conception of the unity of nature, which had 



86 THE REXniN TO FAITH 

been first suggested in Xewton's great dis- 
covery of uniTersal graritation, came to its 
consummation in that great age of which 
we are speaking,, in the discoveries of conser- 
vation of energy and of evolution. 

No one can ignore the fact that man is 
a part of the system of nature, intimately 
related with the world of lower hfe. The 
possession and domination of the mind of 
the age by its new conception of the unity 
of nature led men to emphasize in thought 
the links which bind man to the lower 
world, and in greater or less degree to ignore 
those experiences of man which are peculiar 
and characteristic. Sometimes this tendency 
found even ludicrous forms of expression. 
A friend of mine who is a tremendous evolu- 
tionist habitually speaks of a man's assuming 
the erect postm-e as '"getting up on his hind 
legs." Of course my friend's view of the 
homologies of vertebrate limbs is abso- 
lutelv correct. Yet the form of lancrua^e 
which he has used would pretty certainly not 
have been employed but for the tendency in 
thought of which I am speaking. In Eng- 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES rt 

land a few decades ago a work on natural 
history was in process of publication, in 
which each volume bore as a title the name of 
some particular group of organisms. The 
volume devoted to the Primates, an order 
which, as accepted by most zoologists, in- 
cludes a wide range of forms — lemurs, mon- 
keys, apes, and man — appeared with the 
short and startling title "Monkeys." The 
clear recognition of correlation between psy- 
chical phenomena and cerebral changes and 
of the necessity of extending the doctrine of 
correlation of energy to cerebral changes, 
brought inevitably a tendency to ignore or 
deny the existence of anything in the psy- 
chical life of man which could not be for- 
mulated in terms of matter and energy. 
Hence came vague talk about thought as a 
secretion of the brain, or consciousness as a 
mode of motion. In this tendency to unify 
man and nature by ignoring whatever was 
peculiar to man the freedom of the will was 
inevitably repudiated. In denying or ignor- 
ing human personality the very foundation 
of ethics and rehgion was destroyed. 



28 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

In time the pendulum began to swing in 
the other direction. There was a reaction 
from the tendency to effect a complete unifi- 
cation of man and nature by denying or 
ignoring whatever was peculiar to man. 
Men came to feel that a philosophic pro- 
cedure which solves the problem of the uni- 
verse only by an arbitrary simplification, in 
which part of the facts which demand ex- 
planation are suppressed, is essentially 
vicious. Raphael's "Transfiguration" and 
Milton's "Paradise Lost" would not be ex- 
haustively inventoried if we could ascertain 
the exact number of calories of energy in- 
volved in the cerebral changes associated 
with their production. The heroism of the 
martyr is not the necessitated product of 
heredity and environment. When we come 
to our senses, we feel that the belief in our 
own personality, our own freedom of volition 
and consequent moral responsibility, how- 
ever inexplicable it may be, is equally inex- 
pugnable. The belief in personality and 
freedom compels the belief in duty, and so 
lays the foundation of ethics. The faith in 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 29 

a personal man makes it easy to believe in 
a personal God. But it is not alone the 
individual experience of human life as re- 
vealed in each man's consciousness that 
suggests a faith in God. The collective ex- 
perience of humanity bears a like testimony. 
The universality of religion among mankind 
is an immensely significant fact. It is not, 
indeed, a demonstration of the truth of 
theism, but it is a factor of great value in 
any just estimate of the probability of that 
doctrine. The God concealed in nature is 
revealed in man. 

I found him not in world or sun. 

Or eagle's wing, or insect's eye; 

Nor through the questions men may try. 
The pretty cobwebs we have spun . 

If e'er when faith had fallen asleep, 
I heard a voice, "Believe no more," 
And heard an ever-breaking shore 

That tumbled in the godless deep; 

A warmth within the breast would melt 
The freezing reason's colder part. 
And like a man in wrath the heart 

Stood up and answered, "I have felt." 



30 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

No, like a child in doubt and fear: 
But that blind clamor made me wise; 
Then was I as a child that cries. 

But, crying, knows his father near; 

And what I am beheld again 

What is, and no man understands; 
And out of darkness came the hands 

That reach through nature, molding man. 

2. Romanes lost his faith by thinking that 
the implications of evolution were atheistic. 
He regained his faith by coming to a realiza- 
tion that the scientific conception of evolu- 
tion involves no contradiction of theistic or 
Christian belief. 

It is not strange that the doctrine of evolu- 
tion, involving an explicit denial of creation 
in the sense in which that word had been 
commonly used, seemed at first sight to be 
absolutely destructive of theistic belief. But 
the experience of the sixteenth century was 
destined to repeat itself in the nineteenth. 
The Copernican astronomy seemed to many 
in its own time utterly fatal to a religion 
whose sacred writers evidently thought of 
the earth as the central and all-important 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 31 

body of the universe, and thought of the 
celestial orbs as merely decorative append- 
ages to the earth. But Christianity sur- 
vived, though the sure and firm-set earth 
upon which it rested was knocked from 
imder it. In like manner, before the close 
of the nineteenth century it had come to be 
widely recognized that the essential beliefs 
of Christianity could be adjusted to an 
evolutionary conception of the universe. It 
is, indeed, true that the philosophical and 
theological problems offered by evolution 
have not been completely solved. It must 
be the work of wiser generations than ours 
to work out a complete and consistent theis- 
tic evolutionary philosophy. But, if we are 
not able, as yet, to reach a complete solu- 
tion, we can at least reach provisional and 
partial solutions of the problem which are 
sufficient to justify a faith that there is no 
hopeless and irreconcilable conflict between 
science and religion. We have reached a 
modus Vivendi which will enable us to live 
in peace while surveys along the frontiers of 
science and religion are in progress. 



S2 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

Of course we do not believe in the "car- 
penter God" of the old popular theolog\' — 
the God who built a universe as a man builds 
an elaborate machine, and then left it to 
run until it should run down or be wound 
up again, contemplating it from without, 
and occasionally interposing to alter its 
adjustments and make some change in its 
movements. But we can believe in a God 

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, 
And the roimd ocean and the hving air. 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man. 

We can beheve in a God in whom "we live, 
and move, and have oiu- being." The great 
truth of the divine inmianence, the funda- 
mental doctrine of any theistic evolutionary 
philosophy, expresses itself oftentimes in the 
language of pantheism. But there is a 
world-wide difference between what is ordi- 
narily called pantheism, with its denial of 
personaHty ahke in man and in God, and the 
philosophy which believes in the personality 
of God because it believes in the personahty 
of man, and finds the ground of the uni- 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 33 

formity of nature in personal will, eternally 
expressing eternal wisdom and eternal love. 

Of course we do not believe in the inerrant 
Bible, but the Bible is no less truly the record 
of a divine revelation in Christ Jesus. We 
no longer mistake the Eden legend for his- 
tory; but no less, through that allegorical 
or legendary form, we see shadowed forth 
the supreme ethical truth in the history of 
our race that sin — sin in the individual and 
sin transmitted by inheritance and by educa- 
tion from generation to generation — has 
been the one thing that has cursed mankind, 
robbing the race of its divine birthright, and 
preventing the fulfillment of its boundless 
potentialities of good. And thus we have 
learned to think of the redemptive work of 
Christ not as restoring to us an imaginary 
paradise that had been lost, but as enabling 
us to make actual a potential paradise that 
sin had forfeited. 

We may be skeptical in regard to a dog- 
matic dualism that would ground our faith 
in ethics on the conception of an immaterial 
spirit, and ground our faith in immortality 



34 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

on the supposed indivisibility and conse- 
quent indissolubility of that spirit. We have 
learned, rather, to ground our ethics on the 
necessary belief of the freedom and responsi- 
bility of the ego, whatever in essence that 
ego may be, and from whatever origin that 
ego may have been derived. We have come 
to ground our hope of immortahty not on the 
supposed indivisible unity of the spirit, but 
on that boundless capacity for progress 
which characterizes humanity, and which 
makes us feel that the hfe that now is can 
be only an embryonic hfe demanding a 
larger life for its fulfillment. 

3. Romanes lost his faith through the 
notion that the results of biblical criticism 
had so far discredited the traditional view of 
the date and authorship of the bibhcal writ- 
ings as entirely to invalidate the conception 
of Christianity as a liistoric revelation. He 
regained his faith tlu'ough the belief that the 
constructive results of biblical criticism had 
established the authenticity of enough of the 
New Testament documents to afford vaHd 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 35 

evidence of the historical facts on which 
Christian faith is founded. 

Certainly, the foundations of Christian 
faith are in a far better condition than they 
were a few decades ago, when the authen- 
ticity of all scriptural documents was tra- 
ditionally accepted as an integral part of the 
faith itself, and when the investigation of 
critical questions was regarded as an act 
of impiety. Thank God that the spade and 
pickax have been at work aroimd the foun- 
dations of our faith. If the excavation has 
shown the weakness and worthlessness of 
some of the supposed foundations of faith, it 
has revealed the substantial strength of 
others. What if the Pentateuch is com- 
posite? What if there were two Isaiahs? 
What if Paul did not write the Epistle to the 
Hebrews? What if the so-called Second 
Epistle of Peter is a pseudonymous work of 
the second century? There is an immense 
significance in the unquestionable authen- 
ticity of the Epistles to the Romans, Gala- 
tians, and the Corinthians, and in the unques- 
tionably early date of the Synoptic Gospels. 



36 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

So much as is affirmed in the quotation 
from Romanes may be accepted as imques- 
tionable. Considerably more than that, I be- 
lieve, can be claimed as highly probable. In 
spite of all the difficulties which the Fourth 
Gospel presents, it seems to me that the 
behef that it was actually written by the 
beloved disciple, the son of Zebedee and the 
brother of James, is far more probable than 
the behef that, after the Synoptic Gospels 
had come into general acceptance, there ap- 
peared some time id the second century a 
new and anon^Tnous Gospel by an unknown 
author, contradicting in important particu- 
lars the statements of the Synoptic Gospels, 
and presenting a different view of the gen- 
eral scope of the teaching of the Master, and 
that the work of that unknown writer was 
at once accepted by the church throughout 
the Roman empire and placed on an equaHty 
with the Synoptics ; more probable than that 
a book which bears so conspicuously on 
almost every page the characteristic marks 
of personal narrative should have been an 
elaborate forgery by an anonymous dreamer. 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 37 

surpassing even DeFoe in the art of giving 
to the product of imagination the form and 
features of hfe. 

But be that as it may. Enough to know 
that in its broader outlines the portrait of 
Jesus which stands before us in the New 
Testament is a contemporary portrait. So 
much is certified to us by the notarial seal 
of modern criticism. The Jesus whose 
unique character was an oasis of heaven in 
the sin-blasted desert of earth — teacher of 
a morality unapproached in its stern purity, 
yet friend of sinners; incarnation of self- 
sacrifice, yet free from taint of asceticism 
or stoicism; bearing in sympathetic woe the 
burden of the world's sin, yet making the 
wedding feast more gladsome by his pres- 
ence, and condescending in his last agony to 
ask the faint alleviation of a drink to moisten 
his parched lips and tongue; brave, patient, 
tender to all ; sympathizing with the sorrows 
of every human soul, though none could 
sympathize with him — that Jesus was no 
dream of tender, saintly souls when the 
simple outlines of history had grown dim 



38 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

with the lapse of years, but was painted from 
life. And the story of the resurrection was 
no myth slowly developing itself after the 
generation to which the original companions 
of Jesus belonged had vanished from the 
earth. When we read in the First Epistle 
to the Corinthians "that he was seen of 
Cephas, then of the twelve; after that, he 
was seen of above five hundred brethren at 
once, of whom the greater part remain unto 
this present, but some are fallen asleep; 
after that, he was seen of James; then of 
all the apostles," — we have the tidings only 
second-hand from the eyewitnesses. With 
the recognition of the unquestionably con- 
temporaneous date of much of the New 
Testament, Christ himself becomes the foun- 
dation of apologetics, as well as the central 
truth of dogma and the inspiration of Chris- 
tian life. 

I have twice quoted from "In Memo- 
riam." The author of that matchless poem 
seems to me the prophet bard of that age 
of which we have been thinking. In his 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 39 

writings, and most of all in that one poem, 
dating from the beginning of that half- 
century of agonizing doubt, of honest search 
for truth, of undying moral earnestness, and 
of faith at last triumphant, we have the spirit 
of the age uttering itself in sweetest music. 
In that return to faith which marks the close 
of the old century and the dawn of the new 
one, the prophet word finds its fulfillment. 

Strong Son of God, immortal Love, 

Whom we, that have not seen thy face, 
By faith, and faith alone, embrace. 

Believing where we cannot prove ! 

Thou seemest hmnan and divine. 
The highest, holiest manhood, thou: 
Our wills are ours, we know not how; 

Our wills are ours, to make them thine. 

Our little systems have their day; 
They have their day, and cease to be: 
They are but broken lights of thee. 

And thou, O Lord, art more than they. 

We have but faith: we cannot know; 

For knowledge is of things we see; 

And yet we trust it comes from thee, 
A beam in darkness: let it grow. 



40 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

Let knowledge grow from more to more, 
But more of reverence in us dwell; 
That mind and soul, according well. 

May make one music as before, 

But vaster. We are fools and slight; 

We mock thee when we do not fear; 

But help thy foolish ones to bear; 
Help thy vain worlds to bear thy Ught. 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 41 



II 

THE ALTERNATIVE— CHRIS- 
TIANITY OR AGNOSTICISM 

ADDRESS ON MATRICULATION DAY, SCHOOL OF 

THEOLOGY, BOSTON UNIYERSITY, 

OCTOBER 12, 1887 

When the mountain climber has ascended 
but a few hundred feet above the plain or 
valley in which he started, he often comes to 
some projecting ledge of rock from which a 
wide prospect opens before him. He almost 
seems to himself to have reached the summit, 
so wide, so grand is the view which presents 
itself to him. He thinks he sees objects in 
their true perspective, as they will appear 
when he reaches the summit. He turns re- 
luctantly from the splendid prospect to fol- 
low the mountain path, which leads into the 
woods. He toils along, perhaps for hours, 
seeing nothing but the rough stones on which 
he treads and the thickets through which he 



42 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

tears his way. The vision which he has en- 
joyed stays with him as a memory and a 
hope; but for the present it has vanished 
from his sight. At last he reaches the sum- 
mit, and there flashes before his sight a pic- 
ture — the same, yet not the same ; a prospect 
larger in outline and truer in perspective, a 
prospect which he recognizes now to be far 
better than that which has haunted his 
memory through those hours of toil. 

There is something analogous to this in 
the progress of the human mind. Observa- 
tions of phenomena roughly put together by 
such laws as may first suggest themselves 
bring to the mind conceptions of beautiful 
generalizations, and the mind rejoices in the 
views of large and comprehensive truths 
which it seems to have gained. But, as 
knowledge advances, the evidence upon 
which those beautiful but premature gen- 
eralizations rested is seen to be largely fal- 
lacious. The supposed facts which suggested 
them prove to be errors of observation, or 
the analogies on the strength of which they 
were inferred are seen to involve errors of 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 43 

interpretation. It comes to be seen that, if 
those grand and high conceptions are to be 
maintained, it must be on other grounds than 
those on which they were first beheved, and 
in other connections than those in which they 
first presented themselves. If they are to 
hve, they must Hve by a resurrection, for 
now they are dead. At length some new 
discovery places things in new relations, 
and the long-discredited conception is vindi- 
cated and reestablished. The dead truth 
experiences a resurrection. Thus again and 
again it has happened in the progress of the 
individual mind and in the progress of the 
human mind collectively. 

Let me give an illustration from the realm 
of physical science. Men scarcely open their 
eyes at all before they are struck with the 
resemblance between the fires which they 
kindle on the earth and that great fire which 
blazes in the sky and which gives perpetual 
light and heat to the earth ; and no generali- 
zation seems more plausible, as none is more 
beautiful, than that which assumes an essen- 
tial identity between the earthly fire and the 



44. THE RETURN TO FAITH 

heavenly fire. That thought appears in 
many forms. In the old mytholog}" it is the 
story of Prometheus. In a scientific or 
pseudo-scientific form it is the conception 
of the element of fire, one of the four ele- 
ments of the ancient philosophers. But, as 
science grows, this magnificent generaliza- 
tion is seen to be based upon crude miscon- 
ceptions, and the generahzation itself, grand 
and beautiful as it is, vanishes from the 
realm of science and lives in poetry alone. 
The poet indeed continues to sing : 

Rivers to the ocean run. 
Nor stay in aU their course; 

Fire, ascending, seeks the sun; 
Both speed them to their source. 

But only the poet recognizes the sim as the 
source of the earthly fires. The element of 
fire has vanished from science, and phlogis- 
ton and caloric in turn reign in its stead. 
The chemist and the astronomer go plodding 
their separate ways, each busied with his own 
special class of facts, knowing and caring 
very little about what the other is doing. 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 45 

The chemist cares not what causes the heat 
of the sun, and the astronomer cares not 
what causes the heat of combustion. At 
length the time comes for the dead truth to 
rise again, not by the work of the astrono- 
mer, nor by that of the chemist, but by the 
conceptions that come from another field of 
science. In the hght of the doctrines of 
modern physics, men come to see that it is 
the energy of the sun which tears apart the 
atoms of oxygen and carbon which exist in 
the atmosphere in combination as carbon 
dioxide, and thus allows the carbon atoms 
to be stored up in vegetable tissues ; and that, 
when those atoms rush together again in 
combustion, they give back the equivalent of 
the energy by which they were torn asimder. 
Thus, in a new form, other and yet the same, 
the generalization of the oneness of the 
earthly fire and the heavenly fire comes back 
to us; and that which for generations has 
been only a poetic dream becomes the ac- 
cepted truth of modern science. 

What has happened in the world of 
science has happened also in the world of 



46 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

religious thought. The first idea of causa- 
tion is undoubtedly derived from man's own 
experience of volition. Man feels that he 
does do something himself, that he does pro- 
duce movement; and thus he naturally 
jumps to the conclusion that all things which 
are moved around him must be moved by 
some cause analogous to that which he finds 
in his own will. He, accordingly, attributes 
all phenomena of nature to the action of a 
being or beings possessing attributes similar 
to those which consciousness reveals to him 
in his own mind. Most commonly this primi- 
tive idea of causation in nature takes the 
form of polytheism, and that form seems to 
me far more natural than that of monothe- 
ism. It is difficult to see how the idea of the 
unity of nature could present itself to the 
savage or unscientific mind. The different 
forces of nature seem to be at work inde- 
pendently and discordantly; and the most 
natural explanation would seem to be found 
in a plurahty of deities. I hardly see how 
any philosophical thinker can explain the 
altogether exceptional monotheistic faith of 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 47 

the Hebrew people — a people no farther 
advanced in the scientific view of nature than 
the polytheistic peoples around them — other- 
wise than in the belief that in some extraor- 
dinary way God did speak to that people, 
and reveal himself in his unity. But, be 
that as it may, the power that works in na- 
ture is conceived of in this stage of human 
thought as essentially human. It is con- 
ceived of as endowed with human faculties, 
sharing human feelings, and acted upon by 
the same motives which actuate men. Its 
favor is to be secured by entreaties or by 
gifts. Anthropomorphism is, then, the 
essential characteristic of the primitive faith 
in a personal God or in personal gods. But 
this anthropomorphism is sure to be dis- 
credited by the progress of science. The 
primitive faith begins to decay as soon as it 
is established. In fact, it never is established 
as a complete and universal explanation of 
the phenomena of nature. It was, I believe, 
Adam Smith who first called attention to 
the remarkable fact that the principle of 
weight or gravitation has never been deified. 



48 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

There have been gods of sunshine and storm, 
gods of air and earth and sea, gods of hfe 
and death, but never a god of gravitation or 
weight; and the exception shows why the 
anthropomorphic faith is inevitably destined 
to vanish. The force of gravitation has 
never been personified, simply because, from 
the very beginning of observation of nature, 
that force has seemed to be so absolutely con- 
stant, so utterly unchanging. The power 
that brings the stone down to the earth is 
certainly something different from the power 
of the human will. But as men advance in 
the knowledge of nature they find that those 
things which have seemed lawless and capri- 
cious take their places under law as constant 
and unchanging as gravitation itself. They 
see that the movements of planets, the 
changes of seasons, the fluctuations of 
weather, the endless chemical metamor- 
phoses of combination and decomposition, 
the growth and decay of living organisms, 
the evolution of the globe itself, are all con- 
trolled by laws as changeless as that by which 
the stone falls to the earth. They see that. 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 49 

as there is no caprice, and therefore no man- 
like agency, in gravitation, there is no 
caprice, and therefore no manhke agency, in 
any other of the processes of nature. Thus 
the advance of science brings with it the loss 
of the anthropomorphic faith of early days. 

Closely analogous is the history of an- 
other great doctrine of primitive religion. 
Very early in human experience comes the 
thought that there is something in man him- 
self which is different from the material body 
that presents itself to the senses. The savage 
sees the image which looks up at him from 
the surface of still water, and the dark, mys- 
terious shape which follows him wherever he 
goes; and there comes to him a vague sense 
of some element of his being more ethereal 
than the body. The body is stunned by a 
blow, or it falls in a fainting fit; there are 
the same flesh and bones, but something has 
gone — something spiritual, that made the 
body what it was. The savage sleeps, and 
in dreams he seems to leave the scenes 
around him, and to wander through regions 
which he has visited in the past or regions 



50 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

which he knows only by imagination. And 
there come to him in dreams the shapes of 
those he has known on earth who have van- 
ished from his bodily sight forever. So he 
comes to beheve that this mysterious some- 
thing, which is in the body yet not of the 
body, may survive when the body is dust, 
and may haunt the happy hunting-grounds 
when things of earth have vanished from his 
sight. But this primitive faith in immor- 
tahty, like the primitive faith in personal 
deities, is destined to inevitable decay. The 
shadow and the reflection belong not to man 
alone, but to other things, and the animistic 
explanation gives place to one founded on 
the laws of optics. As men come to know 
more about the processes of their own bodies, 
it is seen that those things which were sup- 
posed to be unquestionable revelations of a 
spiritual substance are to be explained as 
exceptional or abnormal actions of the or- 
ganism itself. Thus vanish the evidences of 
the primitive faith in immortahty. 

And yet, brethren, you and I are here to- 
day because we beheve that there is essential 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 51 

truth in these doctrines of primitive religion. 
We are here to-day because we believe that 
there is a personal God, who can be reached 
by our prayers and who is interested in our 
destiny, and because we believe that there is 
for each of us a personal immortahty beyond 
the grave. What is it, then, I ask, which 
has restored to us in other form, and yet the 
same, those primitive beliefs which had van- 
ished? 

Has it been a more perfect science, a more 
accurate observation of physical phenomena, 
a more just classification of those phe- 
nomena? I answer, No. The progress of 
science is ambiguous in its bearings upon 
both these questions. The more we study 
nature, the more numerous and the more ex- 
quisite are the adaptations in detail which 
attract our attention, and the more magnifi- 
cent the general conception of unity and har- 
mony of law which presents itself to our 
thoughts; though the progress in these di- 
rections tends perhaps more to exalt our 
conception of the designer (if the existence 
of a designer is admitted) than to strengthen 



52 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

the argument for the existence of a designer. 
On the other hand, the recognition of that 
law of continuity which binds all phenomena 
together, so that we recognize all nature as 
a continuous growth and development, com- 
pels us to conceive of the power in nature 
as a power that works upon nature from 
within rather than from without. There is, 
then, in the progress of science, a tendency, . 
in one direction, toward a strengthening of 
the main natural argument for theism; a 
decided tendency in another direction toward 
pantheism. Equally ambiguous is the bear- 
ing of the progress of science upon the ques- 
tion of dualism or monism in human nature. 
The more clearly we come to recognize the 
essential unity of all physical phenomena, 
placing all physical changes under the cate- 
gory of motion and believing them all capa- 
ble of formulation in terms of mass and 
velocity, the more we emphasize that utter 
and essential disparateness between physical 
changes and states of consciousness which is 
the strongest argument for dualism. On the 
other hand, the progress of biological science 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 53 

is continually accumulating evidence of that 
inseparable connection between mental ac- 
tion and molecular changes in the brain, and 
of that gradual development of psychical 
function pari passu with the evolution of the 
nervous system, which are the main grounds 
of a belief in monism. 

It is not, then, by a truer science that we 
have been able to restore the old faith. Is 
it by a profoimder philosophy, by a more 
just interpretation of those common facts 
and phenomena which are within the scope 
of the knowledge of all men? I can readily 
believe that there has been a profounder 
philosophy in modern than in ancient times. 
The race probably advances, not only in ac- 
quired knowledge, but also in mental power. 
I can readily believe that modem philoso- 
phers have examined the great problems of 
existence with a logic more severe than that 
of Aristotle, an insight more subtle and spir- 
itual than that of Plato. But, much as 
modern philosophy may have done, I do not 
believe that it is a profounder philosophy 
which has restored to us the lost faith. 



54 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

No, brethren, you and I are here to-day 
not as theists, but as Christians; and in that 
name, which brings us together and which 
forms the bond of our brotherhood, we recog- 
nize the light which has restored to us in 
grander glory the vision of primeval faith. 
It is when we come to know Him who is at 
once our Brother and our Lord that we reach 
the mount of vision from which the old 
views come back to us in larger outlines and 
with truer perspective. It is the mysterious 
Person who lived in Palestine nineteen cen- 
turies ago that has changed the current of 
the world's thinking. That wondrous char- 
acter, the glory and the paradox of human 
history; that Man who could say, "I am 
meek and lowly in heart," and could also 
say, "He that hath seen me hath seen the 
Father," and on whose lips those words so 
grotesquely incongruous on any other lips 
form a fabric as seamless as the robe which 
he wore; that man whose only written line 
was written on the sand (if the story of 
that sole instance of his writing be not 
apocryphal) — that Man has revolutionized 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 55 

the world's philosophy as well as the world's 
history. We believe in God to-day because 
we believe in Christ. We believe in im- 
mortality to-day not because we find con- 
vincing evidence of the immateriality of the 
human soul. 'No; if we do believe in the 
immateriality of the soul, it is because that 
belief seems to furnish to us the most con- 
venient explanation of that immortality our 
faith in which is largely due to the belief that 
Jesus Christ rose from the dead. It is, then, 
in Christ that these great primitive doctrines 
of religion, a personal God and a personal 
immortality, are restored to us. 

There is a use for theistic philosophy which 
I would not undervalue. Of course, if the 
atheist could prove to us that there is no God, 
and if the materialist could prove to us that 
immortality is impossible, then should we 
be in no position to consider the credentials 
of Christ or to accept that gospel which he 
reveals to us. I am an exile in desert lands, 
and dim with years grows the memory of 
the father's house from which long ago I 
wandered. I know not even whether my 



56 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

father yet lives. There is a possibility that 
he does Hve, perhaps a probabihty; but I 
see no way of converting that possibihty 
into a certauit}", or into any such approxi- 
mation to certainty as will bring satisfac- 
tion to the niind. A messenger comes 
bringing what purports to be a letter from 
my father; and, inasmuch as I beheve, on 
other grounds, that it is somewhat probable, 
or at least possible, that I have a father, I 
can examine the credentials of that messen- 
ger, and if his claims seem well authenti- 
cated I can accept his message. That letter 
is to me not only evidence of the particular 
matters to which it may relate, but it is the 
most convincing e\4dence of that which to 
me is more than any special contents of the 
letter can be — the fact that my father is yet 
alive. I need not interpret this parable of 
childish simphcity. Man knows not whether 
he has a heavenly Father or not. There 
comes one who claims to be a messenger from 
that heavenly Father. He presents his 
credentials and they appear satisfactory. 
His message becomes thenceforth not only 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 57 

the evidence of the particular good which it 
may promise, but the strongest reason for 
the behef in the existence of the heavenly 
Father. Let us carry the parable a step 
further. My father's letter brings a promise 
of a gift most precious. If I were convinced 
that that gift was a thing impossible, I could 
not believe the promise; but if, on other 
grounds, I think there is a possibility that 
the gift may be mine, the letter converts a 
faith in the possibility of the gift into a faith 
in its reality. The message which Jesus 
brings us from the heavenly Father prom- 
ises us immortality. If on philosophic 
grounds it appears that there is a possibility 
of immortality, then we may accept the 
promise of Jesus and believe in inmiortality 
as a reality. If the atheists and materialists 
had things all their own way, if they could 
prove that a personal God and personal im- 
mortality were impossible, there could be no 
such thing as Christianity. All that we need 
to ask of theistic philosophy is that it should 
show that a personal God and personal 
immortality are admissible hypotheses. This 



58 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

at least it can do. Whether it be possible or 
not to prove the existence of God or personal 
immortahty on philosophic grounds, it is at 
least possible to disprove the claim of the 
atheists and materiahsts that they have 
settled these questions in the negative. 

How much more than this theistic pliilos- 
ophy is able to do I will not presmiie to 
decide. The force of argimients is not some- 
thing which is purely objective. It depends 
in part on the capacities and the habitual 
modes of thought of the persons to whom 
the arguments are addressed. There are 
sounds which we camiot hear, not because 
they are too weak, but because they are 
pitched on too high a key, mvolving a vibra- 
tion so rapid that the membranes of our 
ears cannot vibrate m unison with them. 
Wliat is true of the physical is true also of 
the mental ear. I can well beheve that a 
community of Platos and Lotzes, dwelling 
apart from sublmiaiy^ cares, like the gods 
on OhTQpus, and feeding on the ambrosia 
and nectar of metaphysical speculation, 
might find profomid satisfaction and rest 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 59 

of soul in the refined and subtle arguments 
of theistic philosophy. But in the masses of 
mankind the membranes of the mental ear 
are too coarse to respond to vibrations so 
deHcate. There are two classes of mankind, 
especially — the one important from the in- 
fluence they are exerting, the other impor- 
tant from their immense nimiber — of whom 
this is hkely to be true. The students of 
physical science — the men of the telescope, 
the microscope, the scalpel, the hammer, and 
the crucible — accustomed to spend all their 
energies in devising more efficient means for 
the exact observation of physical phenomena 
and more intricate processes of mathematics 
for purely quantitative reasoning, are in- 
clined to view with distrust all non-mathe- 
matical reasoning which goes far beyond very 
simple inductions from observed phenomena. 
These men are not to be very greatly influ- 
enced — ^not perhaps as greatly influenced as 
they ought to be — by the abstract specula- 
tions of theistic philosophy. The other and 
larger class consists of those who come in 
contact with physical laws, not in the way 



60 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

of study, but in the way of hard and wasting 
toil for scanty sustenance — the men of the 
farm, the factory, and the mine — ^who, in the 
sweat of their faces, wring their daily bread 
from the hard and grudging hand of nature. 
These men will not be greatly moved by 
the refined arguments of theistic philosophy. 
Whatever may be true of the elect few 
consecrated by inward prompting and out- 
ward opportunity to philosophic thought, 
the practical alternative for the masses of 
mankind is between Christianity and ag- 
nosticism, between a belief in a personal 
revelation in Christ Jesus and a belief which 
will narrow its horizon to the realm of 
physical laws. You have before you two 
creeds. There is that grand old faith — "I 
believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker 
of heaven and earth : and in Jesus Christ his 
only Son our Lord; who was conceived by 
the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, 
suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, 
dead, and buried ; the third day he rose from 
the dead; he ascended into heaven, and 
sitteth at the right hand of God the Father 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 61 

Almighty; from thence he shall come to 
judge the quick and the dead. I believe in 
the Holy Ghost; the holy catholic Church; 
the communion of saints; the forgiveness of 
sins; the resurrection of the body; and the 
Hfe everlasting." ^ There is one creed; and 
what is the other creed? "I believe that 
bodies attract each other with a force directly 
as the product of the masses and inversely 
as the square of the distance. I believe that 
in the transformation of energy the sum of 
kinetic and potential energy remains con- 
stant. I believe that all events in nature 
form a continuous evolutional series." There 
you have the two religious creeds between 
which we are to take our choice. 

It is not in irony that I have called the 
latter a rehgious creed. Those of you who 
know the spirit of scientific men know that, 
in the intense and unselfish love of truth 
and in the solemn reverence with which they 
stand before nature and nature's laws, there 



^The quotation of this time-hallowed formula as a symbol 
of Christian faith is not intended to imply that every clause 
in the creed, in the sense in which it was originally written, 
is an essential element in Christianity. 



62 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

is something which it is not unreasonable to 
call a rehgion; and I do not beheve that 
rehgion — the spirit of reverence and submis- 
sion — would die if we should be compelled 
to limit our creed to a behef in gravita- 
tion, conservation of energy, and evolution. 
But how somber a rehgion! How devoid 
of cheerful hope and faith! It would be 
the rehgion of Mary in the garden — "They 
have taken away my Lord, and I know not 
w^here they have laid him." It would be 
the rehgion of poor Kingdon Clifford, see- 
ing "the spring sun shine out of an empty 
heaven to light up a soulless earth," feeling 
"with utter loneliness that the Great Com- 
panion is dead." ^ There would be a sense 
of loss in all famihar things which might 
express itself in those words, among the 
sweetest and saddest of modern poetry: 

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, 
The earth, and every common sight, 

To me did seem 
Apparelled ia celestial light, 

The glory and the freshness of a dream. 



W. K. Clifford. Lectures and Essays, vol. 2, p. 247. 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 63 

It is not now as it hath been of yore; 

Turn whereso'er I may. 

By night or day, 
The things which I have seen I now can see no more. 

The rainbow comes and goes, 

And lovely is the rose; 

The moon doth with delight 
Look round her when the heavens are bare; 

Waters on a starry night 
Are beautiful and fair; 
The sunshine is a glorious birth; 

But yet I know, where'er I go. 
That there hath passed away a glory from the earth. 

And, if such would be the religion of the 
purer and nobler spirits — a religion almost 
destitute of cheerful faith and inspiring 
hope — what shall we say of the moral and 
spiritual life of the masses of mankind? A 
life cheered by no revelation of a heavenly 
Father, ennobled by no promise of redemp- 
tion from sin, inspired by no hope of a better 
life beyond the grave; a life restrained from 
evil by no foreboding of retribution; a life 
destitute alike of the hopes and the fears 
which tend to make man something other 
than the helpless slave of brutal passion — 
no Dantean imagination would be needed to 



64 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

give us a picture of hell, for hell would be 
around us. 

I have set before you the two faiths, one 
or the other of which, it seems to me, must 
shape the thought and hfe of the present 
age, because I deem it important that 
3^ou should rightly estimate the intellectual 
and moral conditions of that age in which 
you are called to act your part. In the 
providence of God you are called to cast the 
weight of your thought, j^our words, your 
lives, into the scale of those influences which 
are to maintain the faith in supernatural 
religion and save men from lapsing into 
theoretical or practical atheism. But how 
are you to do this? Not by preaching the 
refinements of theistic philosophy. That is 
too delicate food for the people to whom you 
will minister. The}^ will not care for your 
arguments. It is rather disappointing to a 
man of intellectual training, when he comes 
out of the schools and mingles with men in 
the world, to find how small a part of men's 
behefs are based on any intelligent reasons; 
how little of the skepticism he meets is any- 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 65 

thing better than caprice, and how Httle of 
the faith is anything more than tradition. 
You are to do your work, not chiefly by 
marshahng the evidence of the historic facts 
upon which Christianity is based, and par- 
ticularly the supreme fact of the Lord's 
resurrection. At the feet of the masters of 
philosophy and theology, before whom it is 
your privilege to sit, you are to learn those 
lines of argument. You are to master them 
for the guidance of your own thinking, and 
also that, in the rare cases when you do meet 
with some deep thinker who is struggling 
with the great problems of life and destiny, 
you may give him some little help ; but the 
masses you are to meet in no such way. 
Your work is not to expound the evidences 
of Christianity. It is to make the evidences 
of Christianity. 

There came, perhaps, a time in your own 
experience when conscience waked up to a 
new intensity, when you felt a strange 
burden upon your soul, and you cried out, 
"O wretched man that I am! who shall de- 
liver me from the body of this death?" And 



THE RETURN TO FAITH 



latec - 
ofE L 

to tibeia nindi are 
found, as scnae of 
ha^e foimd, tliat IL 
if yoa can point tc 
yoiir experienoe. 7 
deep oonTk^i: 
Jesos Onist dit -. 
nature, and for: 
nindi eartti cai. 



Of SOT 

He is Mi - _ -z 

Hy; wilik^s is 



en yoa were trans- 
■ r ei^th diapter 

::- ^^ G-od, for 

rrnnation 

^: , ^ : ~ 7 ; ^ " You 

- 7 : :/„Liiers 



Lord 



1 



lav 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 67 

with holy character, instinct with the life of 
Christian endeavor, leavening the whole 
lump of society around it by the all-pervad- 
ing influence of goodness. That evidence 
of Christianity you are to make ; and, as you 
go forth to the work, you are to go in a 
strength inspired by the promise of Christ, 
"He that belie veth on me, the works that I 
do shall he do also; and greater workis than 
these shall he do; because I go unto my 
Father." Go, then, to do works greater than 
the works of the Master. Go to raise the 
dead conscience to life, to apply the healing 
balm of the gospel to the sin-sick soul. The 
speculations of theistic philosophy may be 
too fine for the common mind to appreciate. 
The historical evidences of Christianity grow 
dim with years as the original witnesses re- 
cede farther and farther into the shadows 
of the past. But the world beholds the daily 
miracle of souls dead in sin rising, by the 
power of Christ's resurrection, into the life 
of goodness ; and, as in the ancient days, the 
multitudes glorify God who hath "given 
such power imto men." 



68 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

III 
THE ONE SAVING NAME 

There is none other name under heaven given 
among men, whereby we must be saved. — Acts 
iv. 12. 

Peter and John had healed in the name 
of Jesus the impotent man who sat begging 
for ahns at the Beautiful Gate of the temple, 
and Peter had improved the occasion to 
preach salvation through the name of Jesus 
with such effect that multitudes were added 
to the rapidly growing church. The hypo- 
critical gang of Sadducean priests who had 
been in deepest degree responsible for the 
murder of Jesus, could not tolerate the prog- 
ress of a sect the corner-stone of whose faith 
was a belief in his resurrection. They were 
ready to proceed to severe measures of perse- 
cution to prevent the apostles from the 
preaching of that hated name. Peter and 
John were called to answer for themselves 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 69 

before the Sanhedrin, and Peter again im- 
proved the occasion to proclaim salvation 
in the name of Jesus. He hurled defiance 
in the very faces of the murderers of his 
Master, in the words, "Be it known unto 
you all, and to all the people of Israel, that 
by the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, 
whom ye crucifiedj . . . even by him doth 
this man stand here before you whole." He 
anticipated the obvious objection that the 
man who had been rejected by the religious 
leaders of the chosen people could not be 
the true Messiah, and answered it by an 
allusion to the familiar words of the 118th 
Psalm: "This is the stone which was set at 
naught of you builders, which is become the 
head of the corner." That psalm was per- 
haps written for the dedication of the second 
temple. If not written just at that time, it 
was undoubtedly used in the services of the 
second temple not long thereafter. It 
doubtless refers to some actual incident in 
the construction of that temple of which we 
have no other record. The words had doubt- 
less already become proverbial. Jesus had 



70 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

applied those words to himself, and, indeed, 
they found in him their supreme fulfillment. 
Yet has it been true again and again in 
God's progressive revelation that "the stone 
which the builders refused" has "become the 
headstone of the corner." Again and again 
the most important disclosures of divine 
truth have come from the teachings of those 
who were despised and rejected of men. 
Claiming that Jesus was indeed the true 
Messiah, in whom the prophetic hope of 
Israel found its fulfillment, Peter declared, 
"Neither is there salvation in any other: for 
there is none other name under heaven given 
among men, whereby we must be saved." 
And to the demand that thenceforth they 
should not speak nor teach in the name of 
Jesus, the apostles answered, in language 
worthy to be the watchword of reformers 
and confessors and martyrs — of all those in 
every age who have the courage of their con- 
victions and are loyal to the truth that has 
been revealed to them — "Whether it be 
right in the sight of God to hearken unto 
you more than unto God, judge ye. For 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 71 

we cannot but speak the things which we 
have seen and heard." 

The dogmatic interpreters have perverted 
our text, as they have perverted so many 
passages of Scripture, and have found in it 
the doctrine that all except those who have 
cherished a personal faith in Christ Jesus, 
conceived either as a historic fact or as a 
prophetic expectation, are doomed to an 
eternity of hopeless misery. I do not believe 
that any such doctrine is taught in our text, 
or anywhere else in the Bible. If we get to 
heaven ourselves, we shall doubtless find 
there many who on earth never heard of the 
name of Jesus. Such men as Socrates, 
Zoroaster, and Buddha, as truly as the saints 
of the Jewish and the Christian world, we 
may expect to find among our companions. 
Indeed, the words "saved" and "salvation," 
as used by Peter on this occasion, had no 
direct reference to the future life. The sal- 
vation of which he spoke is the Messianic 
salvation foretold by the Hebrew prophets. 
As Jesus was the true Messiah, the promised 
restoration of Israel must come through him. 



72 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

We must remember that when Peter spoke 
these words he was still a Jew. In common 
with liis fellow-disciples, he still cherished 
the expectation of a restoration of the 
Jewish theocracy. All nations, indeed, were 
to be blessed through Christ, the seed of 
Abraham; but they were to attain this 
blessing only by becoming incorporated with 
the chosen people. Slowly did the Chris- 
tian church outgrow its primitive Jewish 
conceptions. Xot until Jerusalem itself 
went down in fire and blood did the Chris- 
tian Church really learn that Christianity' is 
not a national but a imiversal rehgion. 

But with these expectations of national 
restoration there mingled in the mind of 
Peter other ideas more truly Christian. He 
had heard the Master say something about 
a kingdom of God that cometh not with 
observation — a kingdom of God that is 
within us. He had felt in his own soul the 
stirring of a new spiritual hfe, as he had 
passed from the dull formahty of Judaism 
into the intense ^^itahty of Christian faith. 
The hfe and death and resurrection of Jesus 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 73 

had so taken possession of his soul that all 
other motives were dwarfed into nothing- 
ness in comparison with the supreme motive 
of loyalty to the Friend who had died for 
him, and for whom he would gladly die. 
The new spiritual life which he felt in his 
own soul he saw manifested in the lives of 
his fellow-disciples. It flamed forth in the 
fire-tongues of Pentecost; it showed itself 
in the fraternal affection which bound the 
disciples together as a loving family. For 
Peter and for his brethren the inspiration 
which glorified their daily life was in the 
name of Jesus, and in that name alone. In 
that sense the words have come down to us, 
as true to-day as when they were first 
uttered. The inspiration for the noblest 
development of character in individual and 
in social life comes from the name of Jesus. 
There is a notion somewhat widely dif- 
fused that Christ and Christianity have done 
their work; that they were factors of some 
importance in the development of that com- 
monwealth of nations which we call Christen- 
dom, that type of social and public life which 



74 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

we call Christian civilization; but that a 
world which has already achieved Christen- 
dom and Christian civihzation, no longer 
needs Christ and Christianity. This general 
notion is held by different people in different 
ways. There are some who utterly repudiate 
the supernatural claims of Christ. To them 
the Jesus of the Gospels is an amiable 
enthusiast, generally self-deceived in his 
assertion of supernatural claims, but occa- 
sionally stooping to the baseness of conscious 
fraud. His miracles and his resurrection 
these men relegate to the same category with 
the myths and legends of paganism. And 
in their thought the Christian Church has 
fulfilled its mission. In an old savage age 
it was of some use in softening the manners 
of men, but it has survived its usefulness, 
and the sooner it vanishes into the hmbo of 
obsolete institutions the better. Others there 
are who do not so much deny as ignore the 
supernatural claims of Jesus. They beheve 
the church may still be useful, provided it 
will not insist on being too religious. It 
makes a convenient meeting place for people 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 75 

of noble aspirations; it is a very convenient 
agency for the administration of charity. 
These men accordingly maintain a more or 
less close alliance with the church. Many 
of them have their names enrolled as nominal 
members of some branch of the church ; they 
contribute money for its support ; habitually, 
or at least occasionally, they attend its 
services, though they value the preaching in 
inverse ratio to the emphasis which is laid 
upon the distinctive doctrines of Christian- 
ity. Still others there are who have never 
definitely formulated even to themselves 
their disbelief or their doubt, but who have 
a vague feeling that, in this age when Chris- 
tendom and Christian civilization are accom- 
plished facts, it makes very little difference 
what people beheve about Jesus Christ. 

I have heard of a debating society in which 
was discussed the question whether the sun 
or the moon was the more useful to man- 
kind. One of the champions of the moon 
argued that that luminary was far more 
useful than the sun, because the moon shines 
in the night when its light is needed, while 



76 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

the sun only shines in the daytime when it 
is light enough anyway. We laugh at the 
ignorance of the youngster who did not 
know that all the varied lights that make 
the beauty and gladness of the world — the 
azure of the sky, the deep and solemn blue 
of the ocean, the flower-flecked green of the 
meadow, the virgin whiteness of the moun- 
tain snows — are only so many reflections 
of the beams of that sun whose light is the 
life of the world. But I cannot help think- 
ing that those men make a somewhat similar 
mistake who imagine that we can have 
Christendom and Christian civilization with- 
out Christian faith and Christian life. 

In maintaining, in opposition to all such 
phases of thought, the truth of Peter's 
declaration in our text, I wish to call your 
attention to two propositions : ( 1 ) The reli- 
gious ideas which possess transcendent moral 
power are those which are connected with 
the name of Jesus. (2) In the life of the 
individual and in the collective life of the 
race, the inspiration for those reforms which 
are most radical, most fruitful, and most 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 77 

permanent, comes from moral and religious 
ideas. 

1. The religious ideas which possess tran- 
scendent moral power are those which are 
connected with the name of Jesus, 

I do not ignore the truth, the religious 
truth, which lies outside the pale of Christi- 
anity. God has not left himself without wit- 
ness in any land or in any time. In all the 
history of our race he has been the God, not 
of the Jew alone, but also of the Gentile. 
In many a land and in many a time he has 
raised up teachers of truth and righteous- 
ness. Only with profound respect can the 
thoughtful mind contemplate any system of 
religious belief which has prevailed among 
men. There is no doctrine so absurd, no 
rite so fantastic, so cruel, so obscene, but 
that in it we behold a symbol of some great 
truth relating to the mysteries of the unseen 
world. But, while there is religious truth 
outside the pale of Christianity, it is no less 
true that the truth revealed in Christ Jesus 
transcends all other truth in moral power. 



78 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

I stand in a universe of cosmic forces, 
vast, measureless, resistless. I feel myself 
helplessly groimd between the iron wheels 
of a vast machine. Is that machinery of 
nature as soulless and pitiless as it seems? 
or is there a spirit in the wheels — a soul of 
divine pity and love behind the awful mani- 
festation of resistless power? But my puz- 
zled despair in the contemplation of nature 
comes not alone from the fact that nature 
seems pitiless and cruel; yet more from the 
fact that nature seems utterly unmoral — 
utterly indifferent to the distinctions of good 
and evil in human life. The sun shines alike 
on the evil and on the good; the rain falls 
alike on the just and on the unjust. And 
the stern and terrible ministries of nature 
seem as indifferent as the mild and gentle 
ones to human virtue and human sin. When 
the avalanche hurls itself down the moun- 
tain side, it asks no questions in regard to 
the moral character of the people in its way. 
When the volcano's blast of scalding steam 
transforms in one moment a populous city 
into a city of the dead, the volcano pauses 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 79 

not to count whether there be in that city 
five or ten righteous men. Is there any 
moral significance about this world into 
which we have somehow happened to be 
born? I turn from the dark, impenetrable 
mystery of nature to gaze upon Him who 
could say, "He that hath seen me hath seen 
the Father"; and from him I learn that 
wealth of meaning of law and love in eternal 
union, embodied in the phrase which has been 
on our lips since earliest infancy, but which 
we have so slowly come to understand — 
"Our Father who art in heaven." 

I look into my own life. I find instincts, 
desires, passions, which clamor for gratifi- 
cation regardless of the welfare, the feel- 
ings, the rights, of my neighbor. Somehow 
I cannot help feeling, though I know not 
why, that altruism is better than egoism, 
that self-denial is nobler than selfishness. 
But, alas ! the selfish life is easier ; and again 
and again I find myself lapsing into acts of 
self-indulgence by which my neighbor is 
wronged or ruined. I cry in my despair, 
"The good that I would I do not: but the 



80 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

evil which I would not, that I do." Shall 
I keep up the hopeless struggle? or shall I 
formulate my despair into an accursed 
philosophy, and declare myself only the 
helpless creature of heredity and environ- 
ment, and, having in my creed made myself 
a beast, shall I live the life of the beast that 
I have made myself? I gaze on the Victim 
of Calvary, and the struggle in my own 
heart takes on a new meaning. Beholding 
that revelation of the exceeding sinfulness of 
sin, I can no longer think of abandoning 
the conflict with selfish passion. And the 
struggle seems no longer hopeless; in that 
revelation of divine love in sympathy with 
sinful man there comes into my soul new 
hope and courage. 

I stand in a world of the dying. Day by 
day some hand that I have loved to grasp 
drops from my grasp forever. Day by day 
some voice that has been the music of my 
soul is hushed in the eternal silence. Nor 
is it alone the dying of others around me 
that tells me that I am in a world of death. 
The warnings of mortality come with in- 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 81 

creasing clearness in my own body. The 
hair grows thin and white, the eye and ear 
grow less keen, the limbs less strong, the 
head less steady. I am in a world of the 
dying; I am a dying man myself. I was 
born like a beast, I have been nourished 
like a beast, I must die like a beast — and 
what beyond? Vainly I strive to peer be- 
yond that veil of mystery and terror. And 
what matters the question of moral good 
and evil in our lives, if virtue and sin are 
only figures in the endless dance of atoms, 
— if our human life is only a transient epi- 
sode marking a particular stage in the evo- 
lution of a nebula? I go to the empty 
sepulcher on the Easter morning, and our 
human life grows great with the power of 
an endless hfe. 

The heavenly Father, the divine love re- 
vealed in self-sacrifice, Hfe and immortality 
brought to light — these are the religious 
ideas which are bound up in the name of 
Jesus; and in these is transcendent moral 
power. 



82 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

2. In the life of the individual and in the 
collective life of the race, the inspiration for 
those reforms which are most radical, most 
fruitful, and most permanent comes from 
moral and religious ideas. 

For what is the one great evil that curses 
human hfe? Is it dirt, or poverty, or igno- 
rance, or any other external condition? No, 
no. The one dreadful disease which blasts 
our whole race with its terrible contagion 
is sin. Dirt and poverty and ignorance, and 
the manifold external ills of humanity, are 
in large degree symptoms of that one all- 
pervading, all-corrupting disease. I do not 
undervalue the merely palliative treatment 
by which we may relieve these external ills. 
Cleanliness is better than dirt, comfort is 
better than poverty, and knowledge is better 
than ignorance ; and it is worth while to work 
to get the community cleaned up, and 
properly fed and housed, and educated. But, 
after all, there is nothing that cures the. real 
disease in every human life that does not 
address itself to the conscience and work a 
transformation of character. The one great 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 83 

question in your life and mine is: What is 
the supreme purpose for which we are liv- 
ing? Is it selfishness — self-indulgence, in 
some form, I care not very much how gross 
or how refined? Or is it loyalty to some 
ideal above self? A dirty and ignorant saint 
is far better than a clean and intelligent 
sinner. Where the purpose of supreme 
loyalty to righteousness is established in the 
soul, it gradually transforms all phases of 
conduct and transfigures the whole nature 
with its own glory. 

As no genuine reformation of individual 
life comes otherwise than from the inspira- 
tion of moral and religious ideas, so are those 
ideas the source of the noblest and best re- 
forms in society. I do not claim that all 
the good in modern civilization is due to 
influences distinctively Christian. Doubt- 
less many valuable reforms have been advo- 
cated, and successfully advocated, on eco- 
nomic or on sanitary grounds; but he must 
be willfully blind to the records of history 
who fails to recognize that, among all the 
influences which have created Christian civi- 



84 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

lization, Christianity itself has been tran- 
scendent. It is through the fatherhood of 
God that we reach the conception of the 
brotherhood of man. It is the conception 
of the supreme dignity of the human soul, 
as made in the image of God and redeemed 
by the grace of Christ, that has inspired 
the philanthropies of modern civilization, up- 
lifted woman from the degradation of ages, 
broken the fetters of the slave, compelled 
the world's rulers to acknowledge that gov- 
ernments exist for the welfare of the gov- 
erned, and bound the nations together in the 
great commonwealth of Christendom. The 
philanthropies that have glorified our mod- 
ern history would die of inanition without 
Christian faith. 

A^^e, and there are dark shadows in the 
picture of our modern civihzation. Do you 
dare to look squarely at them? Behold a 
school of hterature whose formulated and 
boasted unmorality is essential immorality. 
Behold a school of art whose only ideal is 
the meaningless and shameless display of 
nakedness. Behold our fashionable society 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 85 

mocking the misery of the poor with balls 
and banquets whose tasteless and ostenta- 
tious extravagance recalls the worst days of 
the Roman empire. Behold the greed of 
giant corporations, degrading the working- 
man by wages below the standard of self- 
respecting life, robbing the consumer by 
factitious prices, corrupting courts and legis- 
latures, and in the insolence of their power 
tramphng upon the laws of God and man. 
Behold a gigantic monopoly taking the op- 
portunity afforded by a coal famine to raise 
the price of oil, and distributing fabulous 
dividends, while poor sewing girls turned 
down the wicks of their little stoves to save 
the few cents which stood between them and 
starvation or ruin. Behold the slaves of our 
industrial system turning now and then 
against their oppressors, in Haymarket 
massacres, and Homestead riots, and colossal 
strikes paralyzing the business of a con- 
tinent. Behold our great metropolis falling 
again and again into the clutches of a gang 
of men who were in politics for what they 
could make out of the plunder of society 



86 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

and the blackmailing of protected vice. Be- 
hold the insolent domination of the saloon 
power. Behold the hideous barbarity of 
Negro lynchings, North, alas! as well as 
South. Do you realize that the horrors of 
the Paris Commune belong not to some 
"old, unhappy, far-off" time, but to the last 
third of the boasted nineteenth century of 
Christian civilization?^ And not in the worst 
of these things do we see what our civiliza- 
tion might be without religious faith. It is 
an acute remark of Sir James Fitzjames 
Stephen: "We cannot judge of the effects 
of atheism from the conduct of persons who 
have been educated as believers in God, and 
in the midst of a nation which beheves in 
God. If we should ever see a generation of 
men to whom the word God has no meaning 
at all, we should get a hght on the subject 
which might be lurid enough." ^ You may 

1 If this address had been written within the last two years, 
this catalogue of horrors would have found a climax in the 
spectacle of the nation which claims (and, in some respects, 
justly) the highest civilization in the world, involving three 
continents in a war for its own aggrandizement, and conduct- 
ing the war with a barbarous disregard of the rights of 
neutrals and noncombatants unparalleled in recent history. 

2 Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, p. 307. 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 87 

plant the slopes of a volcano with vineyards 
and gardens, but the volcanic fires are there. 
Our Christendom without Christianity would 
be but a vine-clad volcano. 

I am no pessimist. I am not out of sym- 
pathy with the age in which we live. I 
thank God for the privilege of bearing some 
humble share in its intellectual, its social, 
its pohtical Hfe. I glory in the solemn 
thoughtfulness of its better literature; in 
the fearless sincerity of its scientific investi- 
gation; in its applications of science to 
human comfort and well-being — its anes- 
thetics and antiseptics, its miracles of steam 
and electricity; in its restless spirit of ad- 
ventm*e and discovery, which has well-nigh 
erased the words "unexplored region" from 
the map of the globe ; in its manifold philan- 
thropies; in its political reforms, its eman- 
cipation of oppressed races and nations, its 
embodiment of the idea of human brother- 
hood in democratic institutions. From the 
depths of my soul I reverence those men 
and women whose names are the symbols 
of the work which our age has accomplished 



88 THi: RETURN TO FAITH 

for the uplifting of mankind — ^its Tennyson 
and its George Eliot, its Darwin and its 
Helmholtz, its Pasteur and its Lister, its 
Watt and its Morse, its Livingstone and its 
Xansen, its Lincoln and its Gladstone. 

But there is one "name which is above 
every name," and that is not the name of 
any of the men who have made the nine- 
teenth century illustrious. It is the name of 
a Galilean peasant of the long ago — the 
name that Peter hurled in defiance in the 
faces of his murderers. And what did he 
do to gain that name above every name? 
He pubhshed no book; the only line we hear 
of his writing was written on the sand. He 
made no scientific discovery; he told his 
followers, indeed, to consider the lihes of the 
field, but he evidently neither knew nor 
cared anything about their botanical classi- 
fication. He invented no labor-saving 
machine; he achieved no scheme of public 
sanitation; he organized no pohtical party; 
he wrought no revolution in pohtical institu- 
tions. What did he do? He went about 
doing good. Disease fled from his healing 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 89 

touch, and the wild ravings of the maniac 
grew still like the waves of Galilee. He 
always had time to take in his arms any- 
baby whose mother's heart craved a word of 
blessing. ^Vhat did he? Xay, rather, what 
was he? He walked this sin-cursed earth, 
the one white-robed embodiment of perfect 
goodness. Goodness streamed out of him, 
as the radiant energy of heat and light 
streams out of the sun. In his presence 
haughty self -righteousness was abashed into 
humility, and soul-withering remorse dis- 
solved in tears of penitence. Already is his 
name the name above every name? How 
will it look to us when we look at our earthly 
life from the standpoint of some other world? 
We stand in the narrow, crowded streets of 
modern Rome, and the great dome of Saint 
Peter's seems only a little larger than a 
dozen other domes. We wander off mile 
after mile over the Campagna, and those 
other domes sink out of sight, while the 
monster of Michael Angelo soars up in 
mountain majesty. So, when we look at 
human life from some other sphere, that 



90 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

name which seems even now the name above 
every name will rise into a majesty beyond 
all earthly thought. Then those lives will 
seem to us the greatest which have accom- 
plished great achievements in literature, 
science, politics? No, no. Those lives will 
then seem the greatest which have come 
nearest to the hfe of Jesus in the spirit of 
self-forgetful love. As our estimate of the 
relative value of different lives will change, 
so will change our estimate of the relative 
value of different actions in om- own lives 
and in the lives of others. The simple word 
of counsel or of warning, the tear of sjm- 
pathy in the eye, the warm pressure of the 
hand, the cup of cold water given in the 
name of a disciple, will seem to us greater 
things than the composing of a masterpiece 
of hterature, the discovery of a law of nature, 
the invention of a machine that shall revo- 
lutionize industrial life, or the achievement 
of a great pohtical reform. 

O brethren, whatever else we may be or 
fail to be, let us be rehgious! Whatever 
else we may do or fail to do, let us walk in 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 91 

the footsteps of Jesus! To one whose feet 
are treading abeady the downward slope of 
hfe, the sight of a congregation composed 
largely of younger people brings the pathetic 
thought of the disappointments that must be 
in store in the happiest life. 

The best laid schemes o' mice and men 
Gang aft agley. 

The dreams of youthful ambition must fade 
as the sunset gold and purple fade into the 
blackness of night. But there is one aspira- 
tion that will bring no disappointment; 
there is one endeavor the joy of whose 
triumph will never cloy. Walk with Jesus, 
and on your path will shine a fadeless light, 
the dawn of an eternal day. Walk with 
Jesus, and in your hearts, amid all earthly 
turmoil, will reign the peace that Jesus 
giveth "not as the world giveth." 



9S THE RETURN TO FAITH 

IV 

THE yiSIOX OF GOD 

BACCALAUEEATT SEEMOX, WESLEYAN 
I7XITEESITY, JUXE 27, 1909 

Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see 
God— Matt. V. 8. 

The teaching of Jesus is innocent of any 
technical philosophical formulas, yet it is 
profoundly philosophical. In the simple 
words of our text is expressed the deepest 
law of the moral universe. Purity of heart 
and the seeing of God bear to each other a 
mutual relation of cause and effect. Purity 
of heart makes possible the ^^ision of God, 
and the vision of God leads the soul into a 
higher purity. 

The pure in heart shall see God — in the 
material universe. Wliatever natiu-al phe- 
nomena may attract their attention, they will 
look through natm-e up to nature's God. 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 93 

And this will be true whether they look at 
nature with the naked eye of ignorance or 
with the microscopic and telescopic vision of 
science. The stars may be lamps hung to 
the roof of a great tent overarching the flat 
earth, or they may be vast spheres moving 
in measureless orbits at distances far beyond 
our ken. In either case, to the pure in heart 
"the heavens declare the glory of God." 

For science neither proves nor disproves 
the existence of God. It was one of the 
delusions of my boyhood that the science of 
geology, if not affording an absolute logical 
demonstration of the existence of God, at 
least afforded what was substantially equiva- 
lent to such a demonstration, forcing atheism 
into a position so unreasonable as to be 
virtually absurd. In the first half of the 
nineteenth century Thomas Chalmers had 
treated the subject of natural theology in 
a method which profoundly influenced the 
religious thought at least of the English- 
speaking nations for the next generation. 
The principle of causality requires for every 
commencing phenomenon an adequate cause. 



94 THE RETURN TO F.\ITH 

Hence the eternity of the uniTerse has been 
an essential element of ererr atheistic scheme, 
since, if the universe had a beginning in finite 
time, it must hare had some cause outside 
of itself. Theists were led naturally into 
the attempt to prove that the notion of the 
eternity of the cosmos, or of the matter which 
forms the substratum of the cosmos, was 
absurd. In the eighteenth century a vast 
amount of ingenuity was expended in very 
unconvinciag metaphysical arguments di- 
rected to this end. Chahners rejected these 
metaphysical arguments, and abandoned the 
attempt to disprove the eternity of matter. 
He proposed to base the argument for the 
existence of God purely on the collocaticxis 
of matter. Matter may or may not be eter- 
nal. Certainly, the existing collocaticms of 
matter are not eternal, and the principle of 
causality requires a competent cause for the 
beginning of every collocation of matter. 
Chahners emphasized especially the proof 
afforded bv the new science of oreolosnr that 
all races of animals and plants now existing 
commenced within a period of time not only 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 95 

finite but, in comparison with the whole 
duration of the earth, very short. It was 
indeed a bold and progressive theologian 
who was ready in 1835 to accept the teach- 
ings of geology at all. Hugh Miller, the 
inspired stone-cutter of Cromarty, followed 
in the footsteps of Chalmers, finding in "the 
testimony of the rocks" as to the history of 
Hf e on this planet the sure proof of the exist- 
ence of God. The naturalists of that day 
could see no natural process by which a new 
species could be originated. The words of 
Linnaeus, the father of systematic zoology 
and botany, were accepted as the final utter- 
ance of science. Species tot sunt quot diver- 
sas formas ab initio produooit Infinitum Ens, 
There are so many species as, in the begin- 
ning, the Infinite Being produced diverse 
forms. If, then, the particular collocations 
of matter which formed the first individuals 
of any particular species had a definite be- 
ginning within finite time, they could have 
been produced only by the direct interposi- 
tion of some power outside of the cosmos — - 
that is, God. The atheist was, therefore, 



96 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

supposed to be driven to the utterly mitliink- 
able notion of an uncaused beCTimiino-. 

Xo chain of reasoning is stroncrer than its 
weakest hnk, and we now know well enough 
what was the weak link in tliis pseudo- 
demonstration. That weak link, was, of 
course, the assumption that there is no natu- 
ral process whereby the first mdividuals of 
a new species can appear. But a half-cen- 
tury ago we did not know how soon the 
cham would snap at that point. In the essay 
which I submitted forty-four years ago for 
the Olin Prize, I presented the Chalmers- 
]Miller demonstration of the existence of 
God with no misgiving, and I fancied that 
atheism would be forever banished if man- 
kind m general could really appreciate the 
truths of geolog}'. There bemg no competi- 
tors, my essay took the prize, and I felt the 
satisfaction which a boy naturally feels in 
his own work. It seems strange now to 
think that I could have written that essay 
six years after the pubhcation of Darwin's 
Origin of Species. But the views of Darwin 
made converts ver^' slowlv in this comitrv. 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 97 

The opinions of Agassiz, a man really great 
but prodigiously overestimated, dominated 
the scientific and still more the semi-scientific 
thought of this country. Asa Gray was at 
that time almost the only naturalist of high 
repute in this country that accepted, even 
guardedly and with qualification, the theory 
of evolution. There was at that time, in the 
very scant curriculum of Wesleyan Univer- 
sity, no formal teaching of biology, but there 
was a course in geology. I think I never 
heard the name of Darwin mentioned in any 
lecture room during my college course. 
Certainly I had never learned that Darwin 
had put the doctrine of evolution on any 
stronger foundation than was afforded by 
the premature speculations of Lamarck and 
the author of the Vestiges of Creation. Two 
years later I read the Origin of Species with 
profound admiration, but without full con- 
viction. Time is an element in the formation 
of our opinions, and it was not until after 
the lapse of a few more years that I evolved 
into an evolutionist. 

Of course the Chalmers-Miller demonstra- 



98 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

tion of the existence of God is gone, and 
probably no one will ever again attempt a 
demonstration of the existence of God. Most 
thinkers on religious questions, I fancy, have 
come to the conclusion that it was no more 
a part of the divine plan for the moral de- 
velopment of humanity to secure right be- 
liefs by making religious truths demon- 
strable, than to secure right conduct by 
making men automata. We have come to 
recognize that moral responsibility belongs 
to our opinions as well as to our conduct, and 
that "the will to believe" may be the supreme 
duty. 

Of course I do not mean to deny the 
validity of the arguments for theism, and 
particularly of the argument from design 
in nature. Though making no approach to 
demonstration, the argument from design, 
as it may be reconstructed in adaptation to 
an evolutionary conception of nature, does 
establish a real probability for the existence 
of a personal God. Its stress must be laid 
not on particular details of adaptation, but 
on the general aspect of law and formu- 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 99 

lable order pervading all nature — on that 
aspect of nature set forth in those striking 
words of Benjamin Peirce, "the intellectu- 
ality inwrought into the unconscious material 
world." The book which we can read and 
understand we may reasonably infer was 
written by an intelligence kindred with our 
own. 

But the acceptance of any conclusion 
sustained only by probable reasoning de- 
pends largely on subjective conditions. No 
man is likely to believe on merely probable 
evidence a proposition which too strongly 
antagonizes his own feelings and prejudices. 
To the pure and reverent mind the idea of 
Supreme Goodness as the all-pervading, all- 
animating soul of the universe appears in- 
trinsically probable. But the soul that is too 
proud to adore anything, or too sensual to be 
in love with purity, sees no God in nature. 

It is true, nevertheless, that many men of 
low moral tone and of vicious or criminal 
life have a traditional belief in the existence 
of God, about which they have never thought 
enough to doubt. Such merely traditional 



100 THE RETTRX TO F.\ITH 

faith, possessed of little value either intel- 
lectual or ethical, is very different from the 
vision of God wliich is the privilege of the 
pure in heart. Moreover, it must be said 
that the spiritual vision which belongs to the 
pure in heart does not necessarily involve 
an assent to a creed of dogmatic orthodoxy. 
Men may see God with a genuine spiritual 
vision, and commune with him in a hf e which 
is truly rehgious, though they may not call 
him by an orthodox name or formulate his 
attributes in the language of orthodox 
creeds. The Greek philosophers of highest 
ethical tone attained something like a practi- 
cal monotheism, though holding, after a 
fasliion, to the pohi:heism of the pagans 
around them; sometimes by investing Zeus 
in their thought with attributes far different 
from those attributed to him in the legends 
of popular mythology; sometimes by a semi- 
pantheistic conception of a substratum of 
deity, of which the popular gods were ema- 
nations or personifications. And, as there 
have been men pure in heart who, in some 
deep spiritual sense, have seen G^d in pagan 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 101 

lands and times, so there are pure souls to- 
day who have, in some good degree, the 
vision of God, though they may be labeled 
by themselves and by others rather as pan- 
theists or agnostics than as theists. There 
is wonderfully little difference between some 
of the theism and some of the atheism of our 
time. Every clear thinker must admit that, 
when we ascribe personality to God, we can- 
not mean exactly the same thing that we 
mean when we speak of personality in man. 
If we ascribe personality to God, we can 
mean, strictly speaking, nothing more than 
this — ^that in the nature of Him who dwells 
"in light tmapproachable, whom no man 
hath seen nor can see," whose infinite being 
must of necessity transcend all finite compre- 
hension, some phase finds its fittest symbol 
in personality as we know it in man. And 
there are men who have never felt that they 
could formulate their creed in the language 
which describes God as a person who yet 
cherish a truly reUgious reverence for that 
mysterious Power of which the material uni- 
verse is the manifestation. Such men are 



102 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

among the true worshipers of that God who 
reveals himself to the pure in heart. It is 
one who calls himself an agnostic who thus 
bears testimony to his rehgious experience: 
"At times in the silence of the night and 
in rare lonely moments, I experience a sort 
of communion of myself with Something 
Great that is not myself. Then the Uni- 
versal Scheme of things has on me the effect 
of a sympathetic Person, and my com- 
munion therewith takes on a quality of fear- 
less worship. These moments happen, and 
they are to me the supreme fact in my reli- 
gious life." 

If evolution has shattered the imaginary 
demonstration of God in which we trusted 
twoscore years ago, it has made possible for 
us a larger and nobler faith in God. Seeing 
no longer the evidence of God only in the 
supposed gaps in the continuity of nature, 
we are no longer trembling with hysterical 
fears lest the next new discovery of science 
may close some of those gaps, and obhterate 
the evidence of the existence of God. We 
have come to see God, not in the supposed 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 103 

gaps in the continuity of nature, but in the 
continuity of nature itself — to find the very 
explanation of that continuity in the con- 
sistent activity of perfect wisdom and per- 
fect goodness. And thus we have come back 
to the position of the old Hebrew bards and 
prophets who made no distinction between 
the natural and the supernatural in a world 
which, for them, was all divine. For us, all 
nature has grown sacred with the glory of 
immanent Deity. 

The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills, and 

the plains — 
Are not these, O Soul, the vision of Him who reigns? 
Speak to him, thou, for he hears, and Spirit with 

Spirit can meet — 
Closer is he than breathiug, and nearer than hands 

and feet. 
"God is law," say the wise; O Soul, and let us 

rejoice. 
For if he thunder by law, the thunder is yet his 

voice. 

The pure in heart shall see God — in 
human life and history. They hear the uni- 
versal prayer which has ascended to the 



104. THE RETURN TO FAITH 

Father of all, in every age. 

In every clime adored. 
By saint, by savage, and by sage, 

Jehovah, Jove, or Lord; 

and they feel that the universal religious 
aspiration, of which the universal prayer is 
the expression, is itself God's v^itness to 
mankind. They feel the pathos of that pic- 
ture sketched for us in Paul's noble words 
on the slope of Areopagus, when he de- 
scribed all mankind as seeking God, "if 
haply they might feel after him, and find 
him, though he be not far from every one 
of us." They see how the idea of God has 
been the inspiration of every noblest word 
that man has spoken, and every noblest deed 
that man has done. If a Luther at Worms 
defies the power of church and empire, and 
wins intellectual and religious freedom for 
humanity, it is with an appeal to God on 
his lips. If a Lincoln writes those mighty 
words that break the fetters of a race of 
slaves, it is with a declaration that he has 
promised God to write those words. To 
the pure in heart the whole course of history 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 105 

seems a continual exodus out of an Egypt 
of bondage and darkness to a promised land 
of liberty and light. The divine guidance 
would not seem more real if a pillar of cloud 
and fire visibly marked the path of progress. 
Even the seeming triumphs of evil have 
helped to work out the progress of good. 
Smithfield martyr fires and Saint Bartholo- 
mew massacres gave new vitality to the faith 
which they sought to destroy. The most 
damning crime of human history, the judi- 
cial murder of Jesus, gave to mankind the 
blessings of Christianity and Christian civili- 
zation. Broadly viewed, the history of man- 
kind reveals a Power that makes for right- 
eousness. The inference is a legitimate one, 
that this guidance of humanity in its prog- 
ress to a higher life has been intelligent and 
purposeful. But, while that line of thought 
is profoundly impressive to the pure in 
heart, it makes little impression upon souls 
that are not in sympathy with ethical ideals. 

The pure in heart shall see God — in the 
face of Jesus Christ. Biblical criticism, while 



106 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

it has contradicted man}^ traditional opinions 
in regard to the date and authorship of the 
books of the Bible, has pretty thoroughly 
established the early date of enough of the 
New Testament writings to show that the 
portrait of Jesus is virtually a contemporary 
portrait. The Jesus who went about doing 
good, who found life and taught his fol- 
lowers to find life in losing life, and in whose 
rebuke of sin the thunder of divine wrath 
blends in sweet accord with the wail of in- 
finite pity, belongs not to the cloudland of 
myth and legend, but to the solid ground 
of history. Thus the character of Christ 
himself becomes not only the inspiration of 
Christian life and the center of Christian 
dogma, but also the foundation of Christian 
apologetics. The evidence of Christianity 
becomes far stronger than the evidence of 
simple theism. 

But it is preeminently true that that evi- 
dence appeals in its convincing power only to 
the pure in heart. In his earthly Hfe Jesus 
won to himself the Israelite in whom there 
-was no guile, and the sinful womari through 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES lOT 

whose tears of penitence shone the rainbow 
promise of a better life. But his message 
had no meaning for the Pharisee who de- 
voured widows' houses and thanked God he 
was not as other men, for the Sadducean 
priest who plotted the murder of the guilt- 
less because he deemed it expedient that one 
man should die for the people, or for the 
cynical Roman who thought any man who 
imagined that he had a mission to bear wit- 
ness to the truth was a fanatical fool. And 
to-day that same majestic Character parts 
mankind on the right and on the left, "as 
a shepherd divideth his sheep from the 
goats." 

It must be said, however, that not all who 
thus see God in Christ accept the orthodox 
creeds in regard to Christ's personality. 
The poetic imagination of Richard Watson 
Gilder sings again the song of a heathen 
sojourning in Galilee, Anno Domini 32. 

If Jesus Christ is a man — 

And only a man — I say- 
That of all mankind I cleave to him, 

And to him will I cleave alway. 



108 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

If Jesus Christ is a God — 

And the only God — I swear 
I will follow him through heaven and hell. 

The earth, the sea, and the air. 

A very Christian sort of heathen was he 
whose thought thus breathes itself again 
after the lapse of the centuries. And to-day 
many devout souls find in Christ the inspira- 
tion of a life of communion with God and 
consecration to God, who know not how to 
define their conception of Christ's person- 
ality. The Athanasian Creed, in its formu- 
lation of the doctrine of the Trinity, declares 
that there are not three incomprehensibles 
but one incomprehensible. One incompre- 
hensible there certainly is, and that is the 
creed itself. There may be doubt as to the 
historic verity of the stories of the birth of 
Jesus in the opening chapters of Matthew 
and Luke, and the dogmatic formulation of 
the hypostatical union of Deity and hu- 
manity may not commend itself as fully to 
the thought of our age as it did to the bishops 
assembled at Xicsea; but, however we may 
formulate or leave unformulated the moral 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 109 

miracle of Christ's unique character, holy 
souls find in him the revelation of God, and 
through him draw near to the Father. 

The pure in heart shall see God — in the 
events of their own lives. To them he is not 
merely the God of the astronomical spaces 
and the geological seons. They see God not 
alone in the vast system of natural law and 
the majestic march of evolution; not alone in 
the great movement of history, as down the 
ages 

The eternal step of progress beats 
To that great anthem, calm and slow, 

Which God repeats. 

They see God in the pettiest of individual 
experiences. The hairs of our heads are 
numbered; our little lives are ordered by 
God's care. The daily comforts of life are 
the gifts of Him who feeds the ravens and 
who clothes the lilies in beauty. In all 
earthly loves that gladden our lives — all 
sweet affections in the home, and all enno- 
bling friendships — ^we may see new incarna- 
tions of the great love of the Heavenly 



110 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

Father. And the pure in heart find it easy 
to see God in the dark things of hfe. They 
may cry with the hero of the majestic 
Hebrew drama, "Though he slay me, yet 
will I trust in him." Or with the sweet 
Christian poet of our own New England 
they may sing: 

I dimly guess from blessiags known 

Of greater out of sight, 
And, with the chastened psalmist, own 

His judgments too are right. 

I long for household voices gone. 

For vanished smiles I long. 
But God hath led my dear ones on. 

And he can do no wrong. 

I kQow not what the futiure hath 

Of marvel or surprise. 
Assured alone that life and death 

His mercy underUes. 

And if my heart and flesh are weak 

To bear an untried pain, 
The bruised reed he will not break, 

But strengthen and sustain. 

The pure in heart shall see God — in the 
subjective experiences of their own souls. 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 111 

And this not alone in peculiar and appar- 
ently supernatural experiences such as, if 
we may accept the record as literal history, 
fell to the lot of patriarchs and prophets and 
apostles. The theist must, of course, believe 
in the possibility of miracle. He cannot limit 
his conception of God's power by the bound- 
aries of his own experience. He must recog- 
nize the possibility of revelations of truth 
and duty to individual souls in extraordinary 
methods. Yet no one can doubt that the 
Hebrew tendency to symbolism and personi- 
fication has very largely shaped the scrip- 
tural representations of the religious experi- 
ence of the ancient saints. None of us, I 
suppose, believes to-day that Jehovah liter- 
ally walked in the garden in the cool of the 
day and engaged in conversation with Adam 
and Eve. The call of Abraham to journey 
westward from Ur of the Chaldees, and 
found a theocratic nation in the promised 
land beyond the Syrian desert, may not have 
been very different from the call of the Pil- 
grims of the Mayflower to found a Christian 
commonwealth in the new continent beyond 



112 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

the Atlantic. The missionarj^ call of Paul 
and Barnabas may not have been very dif- 
ferent from that of Carey or Thobm-n. And 
in the raptures and ecstasies of medieval 
saints, hke Francis of Assisi, it is not always 
easy to decide how much is divine and how 
much is pathological. The pure in heart will 
see God in the common experiences of the 
most prosaic type of rehgious hfe. 

I ask no dream, no prophet ecstasies, 
No sudden rending of the veil of clay. 

No angel visitant, no opening skies; 
But take the dimness of my soul away. 

Theodore Parker tells us, in an autobio- 
graphic fragment, how at the age of four he 
was tempted in boyish cruelty to kill a httle 
spotted turtle. "But all at once," he says, 
"something checked my httle arm, and a 
voice within me said clear and loud, 'It is 
wrong.' I hastened home, told the tale to 
my mother, and asked her what it was that 
told me it was wrong. She wiped a tear 
from her eye with her apron, and, taking me 
in her arms, said, 'Some men call it con- 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 113 

science; but I prefer to call it the voice of 
God in the soul of man.' " In that beautiful 
autobiographic passage in which George 
Albert Coe dedicates to his mother his 
"Rehgion of a Mature Mind," he tells us: 
"A youth complained to his mother that his 
prayers contained no sure sense that God 
heard or would answer. The mother re- 
plied, 'May not your impulse to pray be 
God's manifestation of himself to you?' " 

Every inmost aspiration is God's angel undefiled. 
And in every, "O my Father," slumbers deep a, 
"Here, my chUd." 

If thus we recognize the manifestation of 
God in the common experiences of the reli- 
gious life, our bodies may become indeed the 
temples of the Holy Ghost, and in those 
temples the fire of the Shekinah need never 
die. 

The pure in heart shall see God — in their 
own voluntary activities. In their lives will 
be fulfilled Paul's precept, "Whether there- 
fore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, 
do all to the glory of God." Thus our busi- 



114 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

ness may be not merely a living^ a work by 
which we gain our Hvehhood; but a calling j 
SL work in which we fulfill a divine call. Our 
Methodist fathers had a distorted and par- 
tial view of this truth when they held the 
idea of a divine call to the ministry in some 
unique and exclusive sense, and were not 
quite satisfied unless that call came through 
some more or less extraordinary and appar- 
ently preternatural experience. Every 
Christian life may be glorified by the faith 
that it is fulfilling a divine call. And thus 
all common toil may be transfigured, and 
made radiant with 

The light that never was on sea or land. 

All days become holy, and all work becomes 
worship. Farm, factory, and mine, office, 
library, laboratory, and studio, become 
temples whence ascends in harmony a 
myriad-voiced anthem of praise to God. 

The pure in heart shall see God — in the 
unknown world beyond the mystery of 
death. In the radiant dawn of youth, when 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 115 

the earthly sky is bright with the promise 
of noon, there is Httle thought of "sunset and 
evening star." Eschatological musings 
form naturally a very small part of the reh- 
gious life of a young man of good digestion 
and normal muscularity. But, when some 
of the ambitions and aspirations of youth 
have been transmuted into achievement, and 
more of them are dead and buried beyond 
hope of resurrection, when eye and ear are 
growing dim, and mental power and courage 
are failing, when the earthly future is 
limited to a few days or years of growing 
weakness, the hope of immortality assumes 
a profound significance. That hope is emi- 
nently the hope of the pure in heart. Un- 
doubtedly, the strength of conviction of 
immortality which has characterized the 
Christian Church in all ages had its origin 
on the Easter morning in the faith that the 
Lord had risen. But, apart from that reve- 
lation whereby life and inmiortality were 
thus brought to light, the chief ground of 
belief in immortality is in the conviction that 
man is in some sense worthy to be immortal. 



116 THE RETTRX TO FAITH 

In those indiTiduals and in those societies 
in which the ethical tone is the highest, there 
is, as a rule, the loftiest conception of the 
essential dignity of the human soul, and 
hence the strongest expectation of immor- 
tahty. Those who have on earth the deepest 
sense of the divine companionship have the 
strongest faith that that companionship 
must be eternal. 

Little indeed may we know of that life 
beyond the grave. The apocalyptic imagery 
affords httle satisfaction to any curiosity 
which we may cherish in regard to that un- 
discovered countiy-. It can only give us 
some vame suo^ecestion of a crlorv of which 
gold and pearl, Hght and music — costHest 
and lovehest of earthly things — are the most 
fitting symbols. But it is at least a reason- 
able expectation that the great transition 
that awaits us will be a metamorphosis from 
an embiyonic stage to a fuller and maturer 
hfe, and will bring to us some larger faculty 
for the discernment of spiritual truth. As 
Socrates, before drinking the hemlock, sat 
talking with his friends, he said that he ex- 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 117 

pected to go to other gods both wise and 
good, and to men who have died who are 
better than those here. There may have 
been in his language some accommodation 
to polytheistic habits of thought and speech, 
as in his charge to Crito to pay his debt to 
^sculapius. But we, like him, may hope 
to find in that future life the companionship 
of better men than we have known on earth, 
men who have, Hke ourselves, been born 
into that larger and fuller life — "the spirits 
of just men made perfect," "the general 
assembly and church of the first-born." Cer- 
tainly, it is not for the companionship of 
other gods that we aspire, but for other and 
fuller manifestations of the God whom in 
part we have known on earth. "For now 
we see in a mirror, darkly; but then face 
to face." "Beloved, now are we the sons 
of God, and it doth not yet appear what 
we shall be : but we know that, when he shall 
appear, we shall be like him; for we shall 
see him as he is." "I shall behold thy face 
in righteousness: I shall be satisfied, when 
I awake, with thy likeness." 



118 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

Members of the graduating class: Four 
years you have been studying in this Chris- 
tian college. You have found here no timid 
conservatism, no bigoted sectarianism, no 
narrow orthodoxy. There are people who 
are said to love their church more than Chris- 
tianity, and Christianity more than truth. 
Not such has been the spirit of your teachers 
in Wesleyan University. You have been 
taught to prove all things, and to hold fast 
only that which is good. You have been 
taught to 

Seek the truth, where'er 'tis found, 
On Christian or on heathen groimd. 

But your teachers have been men who, in 
nature, in human life, in history, in litera- 
ture, have seen God. You have learned to 
recognize the whole material and moral imi- 
verse as thrilling and pulsating with the life 
of immanent Deity. I pray you, recognize 
in the sphere of your own personal life the 
God who is immanent in the world around 
you. So for you may the joys of life be 
made more joyful, and the sorrows of life 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 119 

be robbed of their bitterness, by trust in the 
all-embracing presence of Infinite Love. It 
were vain to wish that life for you may be 
all prosperous, but I may wish that your 
lives may glide on 

.... Like rivers that water the woodlands, 
Darkened by shadows of earth, but reflecting an 
image of heaven. 

Take God into the inmost sanctuary of per- 
sonality; surrender your wills to him; keep 
the spirit ear ever attent to that "voice of 
gentle stillness" in which God speaks to the 
soul that is listening. The truest manliness 
is godliness; the completest self-surrender 
is the condition of the highest self-develop- 
ment. In God's service alone can you find 
perfect freedom. So, like the Master, may 
you find life in losing life; and, in whatever 
field and in whatever relations God may 
choose, may you serve your generation by 
the will of God. And so, beyond death's 
veil of mystery and terror, may yours be 
the gladness of the beatific vision. As in the 
name of Wesleyan University — your mother 



120 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

and mine — I send you forth with her blessing 
upon you, I can breathe no better wish or 
prayer than that in your hves may be ful- 
filled those words of the Great Teacher, so 
simple and so profound, "Blessed are the 
pure in heart: for they shall see God." 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 121 



THE INFLUENCE OF SCIENCE 
IN THEOLOGY 

UNIVERSITY SERMON, WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY, 
JUNE 20, 1915 

Think not that I came to destroy the law or the 
prophets: I came not to destroy, but to fulfill. 
—Matt. V. 17. 

Jesus gave to the ancient law of Israel a 
new interpretation which amounted to a 
radical ti:ansformation. Prohibitions of 
adultery and murder he transformed into 
prohibitions of lust and hate. The precept, 
"Thou shalt love thy neighbor," which was 
open to the too obvious inference that one 
might hate people who were not his neigh- 
bors, Jesus expanded into a command of 
love universal as that of the Heavenly 
Father. The permission of divorce on the 
ground of incompatibility he affirmed was 



15tt THE RETURN TO FAITH 

granted only on account of the hardness of 
men's hearts, and he pronounced it contrarj^ 
to the eternal principles of moraht^\ In 
declaring that "the Sabbath was made for 
man and not man for the Sabbath," he 
subordinated ritual observance to human 
need and convenience. He destroyed the 
foundation of the elaborate distinctions be- 
tween clean and unclean meats, declaring 
''that whatsoever from without goeth into 
the man, it camiot defile liim," thus "making 
all meats clean." Xo wonder that to con- 
servative hterahsts his teaching seemed de- 
structive of laws and institutions which were 
believed to have been given by Jehovah him- 
self amid the thmiders of Sinai. But the 
world sees now that Jesus rightly estimated 
his own work when he declared, "I came 
not to destroy, but to fulfill." The ethical 
and rehgious truth revealed to ancient seers 
and lawgivers he freed from the errors that 
had been associated with it, and invested with 
a higher and deeper significance. He trans- 
formed dead law into hraig principle. 
Wliat took place in regard to the teach- 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 123 

ing of Jesus has taken place in all ages in 
regard to the announcement of new truth. 
Every new truth at its first promulgation 
has seemed to involve the destruction of 
beliefs and customs and institutions conse- 
crated by the reverence of ages ; but the new 
truth has in time coordinated itself with all 
that was good and true in the thought and 
life of the ages past. 

The latter half of the nineteenth century 
and the opening decades of the twentieth are 
most eminently characterized in the intel- 
lectual history of mankind by the immense 
progress in the knowledge of the universe. 
In manifold ways science has rendered our 
life more comfortable and convenient. But 
the contributions which science makes to our 
physical well-being are the lesser share of 
the benefits which it confers upon us. The 
half-century of which we speak has given as 
its greatest boon to mankind the intellectual 
treasure of a new view of nature. It has 
given a clear vision of that great truth of 
the unity of nature, the first glimpse of 
which was gained in Newton's discovery of 



124* THE RETURN TO FAITH 

universal gravitation. In the theories of 
evolution and conservation of energy that 
truth has found its consummation. 

To those who beheve that the material 
universe is but the vesture of immanent 
Deity, every scientific discovery is in the 
truest sense a revelation of God. A half- 
century ago it was T\ddely beheved that the 
new scientific doctrines were destructive of 
rehgious faith, and even of the foundation 
of ethics. To-day we are able to see that 
God's great revelation in science came not 
to destroy, but to fulfill. Our theme then, 
to-night, is the influence of science in theo- 
logical behef and religious hfe. 

In considering the changes of theological 
behef wrought in a scientific age we must 
recognize two ways in which the influence of 
science has been exerted. Scientific dis- 
coveries and their corollaries have involved 
logical contradictions of some behefs com- 
monly held in the Christian world a half- 
century ago; but the scientific spirit, which 
questions the credentials of time-hallowed 
tradition, which seeks to prove all things and 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 125 

is willing to hold fast only what can accredit 
itself as good, has brought into question 
beliefs on subjects which do not come into 
immediate contact with the field of natural 
science. 

Some changes in theological belief are, 
accordingly, not the direct effect of scientific 
discoveries, but rather the effect of the intel- 
lectual tendencies which were the cause of 
those discoveries. Yet this distinction is not 
as sharp as at first sight appears, for it is 
probably true that scientific discoveries have 
in large degree created the spirit and de- 
veloped the methods of science. Men do not 
learn to swim before going into the water. 
The scientific method was not developed in 
advance of scientific investigation, but has 
been developed in the progress of investiga- 
tion. In very large degree, therefore, the in- 
tellectual habits of our age which have neces- 
sitated revision and reconstruction of reli- 
gious belief are the effects of the great 
scientific ideas which made their advent into 
the intellectual life of man in the middle of 
the nineteenth century. 



126 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

The discoveries of science have radically 
changed our conception of the authority 
upon which theology rests. A half -century 
ago Christianity was commonly spoken of 
as the religion of the Bible. Although many 
eminent theologians, alike in patristic time 
and in the age of the Reformation, had ad- 
mitted that the Bible may contain somewhat 
of error, the belief in its inerrancy was 
completely dominant in popular religious 
thought in the middle of the nineteenth cen- 
tury. We see plainly enough now that no 
scientific discoveries were needed to prove 
that some statements in the Bible are 
erroneous, for the narratives of the Bible 
contain numerous contradictions. But it is 
doubtless true that the discoveries of science 
forced upon mankind a clearer recognition 
of error in the Scripture than had been pos- 
sible before. The story of the creative days 
cannot be harmonized with the history of the 
earth and of the universe as that history is 
revealed by geology and astronomy. The 
Eden story is no more historic in its Hebrew 
than in its Babylonian form. We may be 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 127 

sure that the Noaehian Deluge did not cover 
the whole earth, and there is no probabihty 
that it was universal as regards the human 
race. Perhaps the most trenchant contra- 
diction between the Bible and science was 
presented by the discoveries proving for the 
human race an antiquity far beyond the 
received chronology. The chronology of 
pre-Abrahamic time rests on two genea- 
logical tables, in which the age of each father 
is given at the time of the birth of his first- 
born son. The summation of these numbers 
gives us the time from Adam to Abraham. 
Now, a number can have only one meaning. 
A statement of the age of a father at the 
time of the birth of his first-born son is not 
metaphor or allegory. It is either true or 
false. The proof of the antiquity of man 
involved, therefore, the most trenchant con- 
tradiction of the dogma of the inerrancy of 
Scripture. 

But we did not at first appreciate the 
momentous consequences to which the aban- 
donment of that doctrine would lead. It 
was a great convenience to be saved from the 



128 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

necessity of finding some device to harmonize 
the two different narratives of the relation 
between Saul and David. It was quite a 
relief not to have to believe that Methuselah 
did live nine hundred and sixty-nine years. 
But, when our eyes were really opened, we 
could not fail to see that the errors of the 
Bible are not limited to trifling details or to 
matters of no religious importance. There 
is not only bad history and bad science, but 
bad ethics and bad theology in the Bible. 
The ethics of the book of Esther is not that 
of the Sermon on the Mount, and the war- 
God of Joshua is not the God whose face of 
fatherly love we behold in the revelation of 
Jesus. Still we found, for a time, a resting 
place in the doctrine of a progressive revela- 
tion, reaching its culmination in the New 
Testament. The theology of the New Tes- 
tament, we thought, we could trust as an 
infallible revelation. But soon we learned 
that we had not reached the end of the 
journey, but only a transient halt, for it 
became increasingly obvious that the men of 
the apostolic age were not in agreement in 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 129 

their theological conceptions. The sacrificial 
conception of the atonement in the Epistle 
to the Hebrews is not the same as the forensic 
conception in Paul's epistles, and neither is 
the same as John's ethical and mystical con- 
ception of a spiritual life imparted to the 
soul in communion with Christ. We find 
in the New Testament not one theology but 
the germs of several theologies ; and we find 
ourselves driven to the conclusion that the 
theology of the first century was no more 
infallible than the theology of the fifth or 
the sixteenth or the twentieth century. Nor 
can we even fall back upon the words at- 
tributed in the Gospels to Jesus himself as 
absolutely inerrant. There are real differ- 
ences of meaning between the reports of the 
words of Jesus in parallel passages of the 
different Gospels. As Jesus probably spoke 
in Aramaic, and our earliest record of his 
words is in Greek, that record is at best 
founded on the translation of a memory. 
We find no ipsissima verba of which we can 
predicate absolute inerrancy. 

Thus we are led to a pretty radical change 



130 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

in our conception of the authority upon 
which theology rests. Christianity to us is 
no longer the rehgion of the Bible but the 
religion of Christ. Not through a book but 
through a person did God reveal himself. 
In the Gospels we have the historic record of 
the hfe and character and teaching of Jesus 
— not an inerrant record, but yet a record 
whose essential historic verity we can trust. 
The picture of Jesus in the Gospels is no 
fancy sketch of saintly romancers, no slowly 
growing myth. That picture was painted 
from hfe. The heart of the Bible is the 
historic Jesus. The Old Testament, then, 
becomes the record of an age-long prepara- 
tion for the coming of Christ in the hfe of 
the Hebrew people. The Acts and the 
Epistles exhibit the Christ-life reincarnated 
in the hfe of humanity. The Clirist-hfe 
could not exist in the world without becom- 
ing the subject of thought. The human 
intellect must try to formulate the meaning 
of the new power which was transforming 
the old sin-cursed world into a kingdom of 
heaven. Profoundly interesting and inspir- 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 131 

ing are the views of the meaning of Chris- 
tianity which presented themselves to the 
companions of Jesus and the leaders of the 
early church; but not to Paul nor John nor 
any other in the apostolic age was it given 
to develop a perfect and inerrant theology. 

The two main subjects with which theol- 
ogy must deal are God and man, and the 
scientific discoveries of our age have wrought 
great changes in our thought on both these 
subjects. 

The popular theology of a half -century 
ago held the deistic conception of an absentee 
God. God made the imiverse a few thou- 
sand years ago, as a man might make a clock, 
and then left the machine to run. The 
Christianity of that time differed from deism 
in supposing that God had not got so far 
away from the universe that he could not 
return to it on occasion. So, while the 
ordinary coiu'se of nature was looked upon 
as godless, God was seen in events that were 
extraordinary and inexplicable. Such events 
occurring within the range of human history 



132 THE REXraX TO FAITH 



cdQed special pTorid^ices or miracles, 
acoording to the d^ree in ivdiicfa tliey seemed 
to depart from ordinaiy experienf The 
ongins of tiie earth and man were, ci ^^urse, 
believed to be inexplicable and tiieref ore 
divine. In gen^^ Gk)d was to be seen in 
tbe supposed breaks in the ecntinmty of 
nature. 

The supreme result of scientiQc study has 
been to fill the supposed gaps in the cm- 
tinuitT of nature. The doctrine of erohi- 
tkn, in particular, is nothiog more nor less 
than the doctrine that the law of conlinuitT 
extends throng the whole history of nature, 
and includes the origin of tiie earth itself 
and of its firing populaticn. 

l^o wmder that the scientific disooreries 
that slopped tiie gaps in which tihe popular 
theology h-ii seen its eridcnoes of God were 
regards : - Imast frantic terror and ab- 
horrence - Titudes of derout souls. But 
the WDiic arned tiiat in its rerelaticxL 
of the ex^e: : law tiiroo^hout the uni- 
Terse sde r : : t not to destroy but to 
fulfill We hsLT& lost the "carpenter God" 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 133 

who built a universe and left it to itself; 
we have gained an immanent God, the soul 
of a universe which we have come to regard 
as a growth and not as a building. Thus 
has come back to us, other and yet the same, 
the indwelling God whose glory was seen 
in the heavens and whose voice was heard 
in the thunder by Hebrew bards and seers. 
Evolution, astronomical, geological, bio- 
logical, gives us a continuity of law and of 
process from the nebula to the world of to- 
day. But, as our vision penetrates the 
abysses of a past eternity, we cannot fail to 
ask. Whence came the nebula? The La- 
placean form of the nebular theory gave us, 
indeed, a nebula so simple and homogeneous 
that at first we were satisfied to take it as a 
beginning. But that stage of thought was 
only a temporary one, for, in conceiving of 
the nebula as a beginning, we were making 
the same mistake as that of the old theolo- 
gians who asserted that God created seeds 
and not full-grown plants, forgetting that 
the seed is a product of growth as truly as 
the plant which produced it. Moreover, in 



134. THE RETURN TO FAITH 

that form of the nebular theory which seems 
to be coming into general belief at present, 
the nebula is conceived as resulting from the 
partial disintegration of a sun already exist- 
ing. Thus we are led to a conception of 
evolution, in which progress and degenera- 
tion, growth and decay, life and death, go 
hand in hand from eternity to eternity. No 
longer can we think of a beginning. We 
must think, rather, of creative power and 
creative intelligence as eternally immanent 
in an eternal universe. Theology may well 
welcome a doctrine which rids us of the 
awkward notion of a benevolent Deity 
spending an eternity in solitude and idle- 
ness before he resolved to create a universe. 
And, surely, thus we come to a deeper sense 
of the sublime truth in the words of the 
Master, "My Father worketh hitherto." 

A half -century ago it was believed that 
man was created about six thousand years 
ago, and at his creation possessed a high 
intellectual and moral character. A theolo- 
gian of the seventeenth century declared 
that "an Aristotle was only the rubbish of 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 135 

an Adam." From that supernal elevation, 
man was precipitated into an abyss of intel- 
lectual degradation and moral ruin by eating 
the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Now we 
have come to regard man as the result of a 
long process of evolution. Surely, there has 
been no such catastrophe as was pictured in 
the old doctrine of the fall. There is indeed 
a profound moral truth in the Eden legend. 
The fall was not actual, but potential; not 
degradation from a supernal glory once pos- 
sessed, but forfeiture of glorious possibilities 
which humanity might have realized but for 
the fact of sin. The conception of depravity 
inherited from Adam is a symbol of the truth 
that we are tempted to sin by the instincts 
and passions inherited from generations of 
pre-human ancestors, and by the evil ten- 
dencies involved in our biological and social 
inheritance from generations of human 
ancestors. 

But the changes in theology which are 
characteristic of an age of science are not 
limited to those doctrines which are logically 



136 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

contradicted by scientific discoveries. The 
spirit of science demands a reconstruc- 
tion of much of the popular theology of 
a half-century ago. We cannot fail to 
notice that much of that theology rests upon 
an unsound foundation. It was based on 
the assumption that the Bible is at least 
practically inerrant — that the inspiration 
given at least to the writers of the New 
Testament was such in kind and degree as 
to make their theological teachings infallible. 
This, as we have seen, can no longer be main- 
tained. But the popular theology involved 
still more vicious misconceptions of the 
Bible. Doctrines were supported by isolated 
passages quoted as proof-texts, and these 
proof-texts were taken indifferently from 
the New Testament and from the Old, 
without any literary sense of the meaning 
of the words as interpreted by their con- 
nections and their relation to the time and 
place and personality of their authors. 
Metaphors were stiffened into dogmas. 
Theology must be anthropomorphic, for we 
can think of the Divine only in terms of 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 137 

the human. But the type of anthropo- 
morphism involved in the old popular theol- 
ogy was determined largely by the social 
and political institutions and the habits of 
thought of a bygone age. God is often con- 
ceived of as an Oriental autocrat, more sensi- 
tive in regard to his own prerogative than 
in regard to ethical distinctions. It is diffi- 
cult not to suspect here and there the influ- 
ence of conceptions derived from pagan 
mythology. Some representations of the 
Trinity seem essentially polytheistic. 

For a scientific age there is no meaning 
in the subtleties of the Athanasian Creed, 
declaring that the Father is "neither 
created nor begotten," that the Son is "not 
made nor created but begotten," and that 
the Holy Ghost is "neither made nor created 
nor begotten but proceeding"; and we 
care not to-day for the one dogmatic dif- 
ference between the Greek and the Latin 
Church on the question whether the Holy 
Ghost proceeds from the Father only or 
from the Father and the Son. We have 
gone back rather to something like the 



138 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

faith of the early Christians before the be- 
ginning of the theological evolution which 
culminated in the Athanasian Creed. "Be- 
lief in Father, Son, and Spirit, all divine," 
says William Newton Clarke, "was light, 
not darkness, to the eyes of the early Chris- 
tians. The Divine Son had been among 
them, the Divine Spirit dwelt in them, and 
by both the Divine Father was made real 
to them. God was in Christ, reconciling the 
world unto himself, and God by the Spirit 
was revealing himself and giving life to men. 
This was their Trinity." 

The consubstantiality of the Father and 
the Son, the hypostatic union of divine and 
human in the person of Christ, the eternal 
generation of the Son, seem to us to-day, 
like the subtle formulations of the Trinity, 
a darkening of counsel by words without 
knowledge. When Christ is called the Son 
of God, and when we ourselves are called 
the sons of God, the language in each case 
is figurative; and an exact and complete in- 
terpretation of the figure is beyond our 
power. It is clear enough that Jesus claimed 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 139 

for himself, and the general consensus of 
Christian thought in all ages has accorded 
to him, in some sense, a unique relation to 
God. He is not simply the wisest of the 
sages, the holiest of the saints, but something 
transcendent. The saying of John, "He 
whom God hath sent speaketh the words 
of God: for he giveth not the Spirit by 
measure" ; and the declaration of the Epistle 
to the Hebrews, "God, having of old time 
spoken unto the fathers in the prophets by 
divers portions and in divers manners, hath 
at the end of these days spoken unto us in his 
Son," ^ seem to suggest that, while to saint 
and seer, to lawgiver and prophet and 
apostle, the Divine Spirit came with limited 
and partial revelation of truth, there came 
to Jesus a revelation of God whose full- 
orbed completeness differs from all other 
revelations as the infinite from the finite. 
Surely, Christian thought recognizes to-day, 
as in the ages past, Christ Jesus as the one 
supreme Revealer, in whom and through 
whom we behold the Father, though we may 

1 Hebrews i. 1, 2 (Revised Version). 



140 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

not definitely formulate the mystery of his 
personality. The Christ in whom the ages 
have trusted abides with us. 

Not the Christ of our subtile creeds, 
But the Lord of our hearts, of our homes. 
Of our hopes, our prayers, our needs; 
The brother of want and blame, 

The lover of women and men. 
With a love that puts to shame 

AU passions of mortal ken; 
Before whose face do fly 
Lies, and the love of a He. 
'Tis he, as none other can. 
Makes free the spirit of man. 
And speaks, in darkest night. 
One word of awful hght — 
That word di\'ine which brought 
The universe from naught. 

Surely we cannot to-day conceive of divine 
justice as demanding the penalty for a 
broken law, but absolutely indifferent as to 
whether the penalty be borne by the guilty 
or the umocent. In our human legislation 
definite penalties are assigned for particular 
actions, irrespective of the state of mind of 
the criminal; and that crude perversion of 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 141 

justice has its reason in the ignorance which 
cannot read the hearts of our fellow-men, 
and in the weakness which compels us to 
inflict penalty for the protection of society. 
But God is under no such limitations. He 
knows the hearts of his children, and can 
never be deceived by sham repentance and 
vain promises of reformation; and he who 
upholds the universe by the word of his 
power is under no necessity of inflicting 
penalty to maintain the stability of his gov- 
ernment. The more intelhgent and humane 
practice of the present day is, in some degree, 
getting rid of this perversion of justice. 
There is a growing tendency, by the indefi- 
nite sentence, by the system of parole, and 
by time allowance for good behavior, to 
substitute for definite penalties a treatment 
of men according to their character. We 
are bound to think of God as better than 
our best. Thus we come to the thought that 
God's justice is not retributive but distribu- 
tive — that its principle is not reward for 
good action and penalty for evil action, but 
a treatment of men according to their char- 



142 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

acter. We can no longer accept as literal 
truth the picture of an assembled universe 
and a parting of mankind on the right and 
on the left. Rather we think of the con- 
tinuous, ever-present judgment which is so 
characteristic a conception in the Gospel of 
John. TsTow and ever stands the Christ 
before mankind, and day by day we are tak- 
ing our places on the right or on the left. 
Heaven and hell are not localities but mental 
states. Those whose character places them 
in hell are there on an indefinite sentence. 

As our conception of divine justice 
changes from a forensic to an ethical basis, 
we recognize the deceptiveness of any hope 
that we can escape the consequences of sin. 
Every act leaves its eternal trace upon 
character, and there is thus an eternal pun- 
ishment from which there can be no redemp- 
tion. 

Only in a figurative sense can Christ be 
said to have borne our punishment. There 
can be no transfer of guilt. There are no 
legal fictions in the court of heaven, and 
God has not incurred his own curse pro- 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 143 

nounced upon them that call evil good and 
good evil. Yet no less real is the faith of 
the church in our reconciliation to God 
through the life and death of Christ Jesus. 
The divine love revealed in self-sacrifice 
brings the sinful soul to repentance, wherein 
begins a new spiritual Hfe. And through 
the ages goes on the fulfillment of Christ's 
great prophecy: "I, if I be lifted up from 
the earth, will draw all men unto myself.'* 
Will that prophecy ever find its complete 
fulfillment ? Will all men some time yield to 
the mighty attraction of the cross? Alas! 
we know not. There is no self-limiting 
power in sin, like the self -limitation of a 
zymotic disease. We know the dreadful law 
of our nature, that acts repeated harden 
into habit and habit crystallizes into char- 
acter. We recognize the fearful solemnity 
of Christ's warning of the danger of "eternal 
sin." ^ And yet we are sure that there can 
be no arbitrary limit to the divine mercy. 
Probation and retribution are not sharply 
limited by the fact of death, but are con- 

* Mark iii. 29 (Revised Version). 



144* THE RETURN TO FAITH 

comitant phases of moral life. To-day is 
retribution for yesterday and probation for 
to-morrow. As, in the age-long education 
which has lifted our race from bestiality to 
humanity, and in the lifelong discipline of 
mingled joy and pain by which the Heavenly 
Father seeks to perfect his children in right- 
eousness, we behold 

The patience of immortal love, 
Outwearying mortal sin, 

we cherish an inextinguishable hope. 

All souls are thine; the wings of morning bear 
None from that presence which is everywhere, 
Nor hell itself can hide, for thou art there. 

Through sins of sense, perversities of will, 
Through doubt and pain, through guilt and shame 

and ill. 
Thy pitying eye is on thy creature still. 

Wilt thou not make, Eternal Source and Goal ! 
In thy long years, life's broken circle whole. 
And change to praise the cry of a lost soul? 

But the scientific spirit leads not only to 
the rejection or modification of particular 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 145 

dogmatic statements; it affects broadly our 
intellectual attitude in regard to all beliefs. 
There are two characteristics of the scien- 
tific habit of mind, closely allied but not 
identical, which may be called, respectively, 
the skeptical and the critical tendency. 

The skeptical spirit feels strongly the 
limitations of our knowledge, the fallibility 
of our mental processes, and the inevitable 
uncertainty of our conclusions. It regards 
all behef s as in some sense provisional. We 
hold no belief to-day which we are not will- 
ing to abandon to-morrow. Our scientific 
theories we hold simply as the best interpre- 
tation we can now give of the facts which 
we now know ; but further investigation may 
reveal new facts, and further contemplation 
may put old facts in a new light. The same 
spirit inevitably influences our religious 
thinking. As in science we shape provisional 
interpretations of known facts into working 
hypotheses, in regard to which only the 
future can show whether they will be built 
into the temple of truth which is slowly being 
reared or be cast away as rubbish, so we hold 



146 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

our religious beliefs not as absolute and final 
truth, but as a creed by which we can live. 
Whether our children can live by the same 
creed we do not know. 

Closely allied to the skeptical tendency of 
scientific thought is what I have called the 
critical tendency. The critical spirit is dis- 
trustful of extreme and unqualified state- 
ments. Most rules have exceptions. Sharp 
lines of demarcation are not generally 
present in a universe which is a product of 
evolution. We always expect to find a cer- 
tain percentage of white blackbirds. A 
good many years ago some of us in Judd 
Hall adopted a logical dictum which we 
often repeated to each other: "All universal 
propositions are false." It did not at all 
disturb us that our dictum was a universal 
proposition, and that we had put ourselves 
somewhat in the position of the Cretan poet 
who declared that all Cretans were liars. 
There are few controversies in which the 
right is all on one side. Very few things 
are black or white. Most things are gray. 

These two characteristics of scientific 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 147 

thought have profoundly influenced not only 
rehgious thinking but also religious life. 
They keep before our minds the probability 
that our own religious beliefs are not abso- 
lute truth but only approximations to the 
truth, and the possibility that others may 
be nearer the truth than ourselves. The 
spirit of sectarianism has its ground in the 
fact that the adherents of each sect have 
assimied that they are in possession of the 
absolute truth of God and that therefore all 
other sects must be enemies of the truth. 
The influence of a humane civilization may 
disinchne men to the violent forms of perse- 
cution which prevailed in earlier times. But, 
so long as any church believes that it and 
it alone has the absolute truth, intolerance is 
a duty. That church cannot rejoice in the 
increase of the membership and influence of 
other churches. Hence comes the waste of 
money and toil in useless competition. 
Hence the unedifying spectacle, in many a 
village, of a half-dozen little churches each 
starving its pastor and starved itself. The 
frank recognition on the part of all that our 



148 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

beliefs are only provisional, and that the 
beliefs of others may be nearer right than 
our own, opens the way for cooperation and 
federation. 

But is federation the goal, or only a stage 
in our progress? One flock, ^ not one fold, 
is the prophecy of Jesus; and there may be 
spiritual union without ecclesiastical union. 
Surely, there cannot be in the future, any 
more than in the past, uniformity in belief 
or in practice. Yet one cannot but hope that 
there may be one great church, tolerant of 
the widest diversity of belief which may be 
associated with genuinely Christian life, 
holding a confession of faith expressive of 
Christian trust and aspiration rather than 
of definite dogma, or retaining ancient 
creeds as historic monuments, without re- 
quiring definite subscription to them, and 
so flexible in its organization as to allow 
different congregations the widest diversity 
in modes of worship — from the stately 
cathedral service with surpliced priests and 
vested choirs to the audacious unconvention- 

1 John X. 16 (Revised Version). 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 149 

ality of the Salvation Army. But, though 
we know not what the form of fulfillment 
may be, we are surely moving toward a ful- 
fillment of the prayer of Jesus for his 
disciples, "that they may all be one." 

The recognition that our creeds of to-day 
are not absolute and eternal truth but only 
more or less close approximations to the 
truth, prepares us to feel a real brotherhood 
not only with other Christians of our own 
time but also with Christians of all time. 
As we fix our vision less intently on details 
of dogma, we see more clearly the broad out- 
lines of the faith which has been held by the 
church in all the ages. With the tolerance 
of a historic outlook we recognize the value 
of the contributions to Christian thought 
and life from Christians of every age and 
every land and every sect. We clasp hands 
of fellowship with saints who persecuted 
each other, and who would certainly have 
persecuted us if we had lived in their time. 
We sing the hymns of Trinitarian and Uni- 
tarian, of Catholic and Lutheran and Puri- 
tan, of Anglican and Methodist and Quaker ; 



150 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

and we are not particular to edit those 
hymns into dogmatic miiformity. There is 
no discord in the chorus of holy song. Few 
of us to-day beheve in all the clauses of the 
so-called Apostles' Creed in the exact sense 
that the words bore when first written. But 
most of us love to repeat the formula in 
which for fifteen centuries Christians of 
every land and every name have declared 
their faith in a Heavenly Father, a crucified 
and risen Saviour, a sanctifying Spirit, a 
fellowship of saints mihtant and saints tri- 
umphant, and a life eternal. 

As we recognize thus the unity of the 
church in ages past, we look forward with 
confidence to a hke unity in the ages to come. 
Opinions, usages, polities, have changed 
and will change; but the spirit abides. The 
world outgrows other religions; it grows in 
Christianity. Christianity has adapted it- 
self to the variety of intellectual environ- 
ment through all changes of knowledge and 
opinion, from the first century to the twen- 
tieth. It has seen the flat earth roll itself 
into a spheroid, and the lamps of heaven 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 151 

transform themselves into mighty worlds at 
measureless distances. It has seen the few 
thousand years of a traditional chronology 
stretch themselves into a past eternity. It 
has seen the chaos of phenomena organize 
itself into the unity of law which finds ex- 
pression in the doctrines of evolution and 
conservation of energy. The religion which 
has survived through all these stupendous 
changes may be expected to live as long as 
humanity endures. We may be confident 
that in all the ages good men and women 
will delight to profess and call themselves 
Christians; not in the vague sense in which 
all phases of our civilization are sometimes 
called Christian, but as cherishing the ideas 
and ideals given to mankind by Christ Jesus. 
As long as humanity survives, men will 
worship a Heavenly Father revealed through 
Jesus, our Brother and our Lord. The 
Divine Spirit will work in their hearts that 
conviction of sin and righteousness in which 
a holy life is born. The divine love revealed 
in self-sacrifice will bind their souls in fel- 
lowship with the Father and with his Son 



152 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

Jesus Christ. In the spirit of the Master 
they will find life in losing life. They will 
do and dare, they will suffer and die, for 
God and man, in holy gladness, delivered 
from the bondage of law into the liberty of 
filial love. For them to live will be Christ 
and to die will be gain. The words of the 
creed are prophecy as well as history — "I 
believe in the Holy Catholic Church." 

Almost fifty years ago I visited for the 
first time the Cathedral of Cologne. I had 
that day the companionship of one whose 
name is honored in Wesleyan — Fales Henry 
Newhall. O how we boys of '65 loved him! 
Many of you have seen the cathedral in its 
finished beautj^ Different was its aspect 
when I first beheld it. The spires had not 
yet risen ; on the crumbling top of one tower 
weeds and shrubbery were growing; on the 
other tower the work of construction was 
going on. In various parts of the building 
stone work which had decayed in centuries 
of weathering was being removed and re- 
placed by more durable material. We hardly 
knew whether we were looking at the frag- 



AND OTHER ADDRESSES 153 

ment of a new temple or the ruin of an old 
one. But within the cathedral the services 
of the Roman ritual were being celebrated 
as they had been for more than five hundred 
years. The white clouds of incense were 
rising, and the voice of prayer and Christian 
song soaring heavenward, mingling with the 
ring of hammer and the click of trowel. But 
the seer who was my companion saw more 
that day than I could see, and I will tell 
you his thought, though mine be not his 
words of music. To him the cathedral was 
a symbol of the temple of Christian truth 
which God is rearing, and the chanted hymns 
and prayers to which we listened were a 
symbol of the worship of the church uni- 
versal. So stands to-day the temple of 
Christian truth. Parts of it seem crumbling 
into decay; in other parts goes on the work 
of construction. And, as we know not what 
is the Christian faith of our own time, and 
know still less what will be the Christian 
faith of centuries to come, we hardly know 
whether we are in the fragment of a new 
faith or the ruin of an old one. But there 



154 THE RETURN TO FAITH 

are some parts of the temple which are fit 
for our use to-day. There let us worship, 
as saintly souls have worshiped in ages past 
and will worship in ages to come. Let our 
prayers and our songs of praise soar heaven- 
ward, mingling with the ring of hammer 
and the click of trowel. Slowly the work 
goes on, the vistas lengthen, the arches rise, 
the spires climb skyward. Some time the 
temple will be finished ; and wiser and better 
men than we on earth, and spirits blessed 
and glorified in heaven, will gaze in rapture 
on its serene and awful beauty. 



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